Celestial Navigation

by Anne Tyler

  Praise for Anne Tyler

  “One of the most beguiling and mesmerizing writers in America.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Not merely good … She is wickedly good!”

  —John Updike

  “A novelist who knows what a proper story is … A very funny writer … Not only a good and artful writer, but a wise one as well.”

  —Newsweek

  “Tyler’s characters have character: quirks, odd angles of vision, colorful mean streaks, and harmonic longings.”

  —Time

  “Her people are triumphantly alive.”

  —The New York Times

  ALSO BY ANNE TYLER

  If Morning Ever Comes

  The Tin Can Tree

  A Slipping-Down Life

  The Clock Winder

  Celestial Navigation

  Searching for Caleb

  Earthly Possessions

  Morgan’s Passing

  Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

  The Accidental Tourist

  Breathing Lessons

  Saint Maybe

  Ladder of Years

  A Patchwork Planet

  Back When We Were Grownups

  The Amateur Marriage

  Digging to America

  A Fawcett Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1974 by Anne Tyler Modarressi

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Fawcett Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Fawcett Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-96701

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78827-6

  This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1 - Fall, 1960: Amanda

  Chapter 2 - Spring, 1961: Jeremy

  Chapter 3 - Spring and Summer, 1961: Mary

  Chapter 4 - Summer and Fall, 1961: Jeremy

  Chapter 5 - Fall, 1968: Miss Vinton

  Chapter 6 - Spring, 1971: Jeremy

  Chapter 7 - Spring and Summer, 1971: Mary

  Chapter 8 - Spring through Fall, 1971: Olivia

  Chapter 9 - Fall, 1971: Jeremy

  Chapter 10 - Spring, 1973: Miss Vinton

  About the Author

  1

  Fall, 1960: Amanda

  My brother Jeremy is a thirty-eight-year-old bachelor who never did leave home. Long ago we gave up expecting very much of him, but still he is the last man in our family and you would think that in time of tragedy he might pull himself together and take over a few of the responsibilities. Well, he didn’t. He telephoned my sister and me in Richmond, where we have a little apartment together. If memory serves me it was the first time in his life he had ever placed a call to us; can you imagine? Ordinarily we phoned Mother every Sunday evening when the rates were down and then she would put Jeremy on the line to say hello. Which was about all he did say: “Hello,” and “Fine, thank you,” and then a long breathing pause and, “Well, goodbye now.” So when I heard his voice that night I had trouble placing it for a moment. “Amanda?” he said, and I said, “Yes? Who is it?”

  “I wanted to tell you about Mama,” Jeremy said.

  That’s what he calls her still: Mama. Laura and I switched to Mother when we were grown but Jeremy didn’t.

  I said, “Jeremy? Is something wrong?”

  “Mama has passed on,” he told me.

  And I said, “Oh, dear Lord in heaven.”

  Then Laura and I had to make all the arrangements by long distance, had to call the doctor for the death certificate and track down the minister, had to help Jeremy find a funeral parlor. (It seems he had never learned how to work the yellow pages.) Had to catch a train to Baltimore the next day and locate a taxi that would carry us from the station. It didn’t occur to Jeremy that at a time like this we might like to be met. What would he have met us in, anyway; he had no notion of how to drive. But some men can take things in hand even arriving by city bus, hailing another bus home again and seeing to it their sisters have seats and keeping watch over their bags. Not Jeremy. Laura and I walked out of the station on a rainy cold November noon and found not a single familiar face, not even a redcap in sight, no taxis waiting at the curb. We had to sit shivering on our suitcases with our feet tucked under us and plastic rainscarves over our hats. “Oh, Amanda,” Laura said, “that cold of yours will go straight to your chest.” For I had been ill for two weeks before this, just barely managing to continue with my classes, as I distrust substitute teachers. I shouldn’t have been out at all. And now Laura looked as if she were coming down with something. Folding and refolding a flowered handkerchief, blowing into it and then wiping the tip of her nose. She wore her maroon knit, which was supposed to slim her some but didn’t. Bulges showed in the gape of her coat. I was in my good black wool with the rhinestone buttons, and my squirrel-collar coat and my gray bird-wing hat that exactly matches my hair. But I might as well not have bothered. The plastic scarf and the Rain Dears spoiled the effect. Wouldn’t you think that Jeremy would at least know how to dial a taxi and have it waiting at the station?

  Then when we finally did find a cab there was some confusion about where we wanted to go. Laura said straight to the funeral parlor. She was always closer to Mother than I was and had acted much more emotional about her passing, sat up most of the night before crying and carrying on. Well, Lord knows it was a shock to me as well but I am the oldest—forty-six, though people tell me I don’t look it—and I have always been the sensible one. I said we would have to drop our suitcases, wouldn’t we? And surely Jeremy would be seeing to things at the funeral parlor. He could manage that much, couldn’t he? Laura said, “Oh, well, I don’t know, Amanda.” So in the end I told her we would go on to the funeral parlor but just stop off first at the house, leave our suitcases and make sure where Jeremy was. The driver said, “Now can we get going?” A put-upon type. But at least he kept quiet, once we were out in traffic. I despise how some taxi drivers will just talk on and on in that tough way they have, giving out their opinions on politics and the cost of living and crime in the streets and other matters I have no interest in.

  Our mother’s house was smack in the middle of the city on a narrow busy street, one of those thin dark three-storey Baltimore rowhouses. A clutter of leaded panes and straggly ivy and grayish lace curtains dragging their bottoms behind the black screens. The sidewalk leading up to it could break a person’s ankle, and yellowy-brown weeds were growing in the cracks. A stained cardboard sign reading “ROOMS TO LET” was propped in the parlor window. The neighborhood was running down, had been for years. Most places had split into apartments and gone over to colored and beatniks, and a few were even boarded up, with city notices plastered across the doors. I told Mother time and time again that she should move but she never got up the energy. She was a stagnant kind of person. I hate to say it now she’s gone but there you are. She didn’t even notice what the neighborhood had turned into. She hardly ever left the house. And over the years all her possessions had piled around her so, her knickknacks and photographs and her shoeboxes full of bits of string. It would have taken three vans just to move her. When we drew up in front of the door I could see the beginnings of her clutter already: the little scrap of a front yard packed with weeds and spiny shrubs and one great long dead rambling rosebush that had woven itse
lf into everything. That will tell you a good deal about the way she looked at things. She caused no changes; that was Mother for you. She hadn’t the courage. If she saw that crack snaking through the mortar or the grillwork fence slowly leaning toward the ground, all she thought was, well, but who am I to alter it? I have no patience with people like that.

  We climbed the front steps and went into the vestibule, where we found a flowerpot containing a dead twig in a hunk of dry earth. I remembered it from the last time we were home, Easter Sunday, and it was dead then. We rang the bell but no one answered. There was a cavelike echo behind the door that gave me a chill. I said, “Evidently Jeremy is out,” and Laura said, “Out? Out where?”

  “Why, at the funeral parlor, I should hope,” I said.

  So we left our suitcases in the vestibule—we hadn’t a house key—and went back to the cab. I told the driver the name of the funeral parlor. He said, “Oh, yes, I know it well. They buried my sister from there.” Well, I didn’t like the sound of that. Just what had Jeremy got us into, anyway? “They do good work,” the driver said. Laura and I only looked at each other. We didn’t say a thing.

  Then when we got there—another rowhouse, but some ten blocks away—and had split the fare between us and decided on the size of the tip, I saw I was right to have worried. There was a neon sign in the yard, blinking on and off and crackling. The windows were sooty and a torn awning dripped rainwater down our necks as we bent to take our galoshes off. And inside! I never saw a place so gloomy. It smelled of dusty radiators. The ceilings were high and flaky, the walls that shade you see in hospitals—either a faded yellow or a yellowed white, you never can be sure. The carpet was worn bald. An usher made his way across it with his run-down loafers dragging. “We are Mrs. Pauling’s daughters,” I told him. He nodded and turned to lead us down a corridor, past a string of rooms where people were standing around looking unsure of what to do next. Laura hung onto my arm. I could feel her trembling. Well, I was quite a bit shaky myself, I admit it. It seemed to me that Mother had allowed herself to slip down yet another rung, continuing even after death and ending up in a place that had decayed even worse than her own. All that sustained me was that Jeremy would be waiting for us—a man, at least, whatever you might say, and our last blood relation, someone to share our trouble. But when we reached the end of the corridor, what did we find? An empty room, a casket sitting unattended. Bleak white light slanting through an uncurtained window. “Where’s—” I said. But the usher had gone already. They have no sense of how to do things in these places.

  They had laid Mother out in a brass-handled casket, a wooden one. Mahogany, I believe. Her head was on a satin pillow. Her hair, which had stayed light brown but grown thin and dull, was set into little crimps, and for once she wore no net on it. She always used to—a light brown cobweb that I itched to snatch off her. A cobweb and a wispy dress with all the life gone out of it and chintz mules that whispered when she walked. Well, now they had put her into the navy wool that I sent her for her last birthday. “Thank you so much for my pretty new suit,” she wrote when she received it, “though as you know I don’t go out much and will probably have no occasion to wear it.” Her face was set in a faint, sweet smile, with her withered cheeks sagging back toward the pillow and her eyelids puckery. You hear people say, at funerals, “How natural she looks! As though she were asleep.” And most of the time they are telling a falsehood, but in Mother’s case it was absolutely true. Of course she looked natural; why not, when she went through life looking dead? Even her hands were right: crossed on her chest, blue-white, waxy at the fingertips. She always did have poor circulation. She always did keep her hands folded in that meek and retiring way, never so much as fidgeting, boneless and nerveless as some floppy cloth doll. On her left hand was a white gold wedding ring, which any woman of spirit would have thrown away years ago but not, of course, our mother. She kept it on. Inertia. She probably forgot it was there. Now for some reason my eyes got fixed on it, and I stared and failed to realize that Laura was crying until I heard her sniffle. I turned and saw her face curling in upon itself while the tears rolled down her cheeks. “Oh, Amanda,” she said, “how will we ever manage now that Mother’s gone?”

  “Now, Laura. It’s not as if—”

  “We shouldn’t have left her alone so much. Should we? We should have gone to visit her more, and paid her more attention.”

  “Jeremy was the one she cared about,” I said, “and he was here all along. We don’t have anything to blame ourselves for.”

  “Jeremy will be just devastated,” Laura said. She patted her eyes with her little flowered handkerchief, which was already sopping wet. “You know how attached they were. Oh, what will he do now? How will he get along?”

  “Where is he, first of all,” I said, and I left Laura crying by the casket and went off to find the manager. His office was by the front door. He was seated at his desk, drinking coffee from a paper cup that he hid as soon as he saw me. “Yes!” he said. “May I be of assistance?”

  “I am Miss Pauling, and I wonder if you can tell me where my brother is.”

  He looked over at the usher, who was leaning against the wall. “Brother?” said the usher.

  “That would be Mr. Pauling,” the manager said. “Yes, well, we saw him of course when we came to the house to—but he seemed, he didn’t seem—but he did help us pick out the clothing. We like to have a family member do that, I told him, though at first he was reluctant. Family members know what would be most—”

  “But where is he now,” I said.

  “Oh, why, that I don’t know.”

  “Hasn’t he been by here?”

  The manager looked at the usher again, and the usher shook his head.

  “Just some ladies,” he told me. “From her church, I think they said.”

  “Hasn’t he come here at all?”

  “Not as I know of.”

  “Well, for goodness’ sake,” I said. I turned and left, with the usher suddenly uprooted from his wall and scurrying along behind me. “Oh, leave me be, go see to someone else,” I told him. “We are surely not the only dead in this house.” Then I went back to the room where Mother was, where Laura was just searching her handkerchief in hopes of a dry corner. I handed her a clean one from my purse. “Jeremy has not been here,” I told her.

  “Oh no, I didn’t think he would be.”

  “Did you ever hear of a son not keeping watch by his mother’s remains?”

  “Oh, well, you know how—I just expected him to be at home,” Laura said. “I hope he isn’t in some kind of trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble would Jeremy be in?” I asked her, and naturally she couldn’t think of an answer. There are no surprises in Jeremy. He will never go on a drinking spree, or commit any crimes, or be found living under an alias in some far-distant city. “Most likely he is holed up in his studio,” I told her. “We should have rung the doorbell longer. Well, never mind.” For to tell the truth I was just as glad. It would have been more hindrance than help to have him moping around here. He was even closer to Mother than Laura was. They knew each other so well they barely needed to speak; they spent every evening of their lives together, huddled in that dim little parlor watching TV and drinking cocoa. I have never understood how people can live that way.

  We stayed the afternoon in the loveseat out in the corridor and greeted visitors, such as they were. Mother’s circle of friends seemed to have closed in considerably. Those who came were mighty brief about it. A moment of silence by the casket, a word to us, a signature in the guestbook, and then they left again. Just doing their duty. Well, I have always said it doesn’t cost a thing to perform a duty pleasantly, once you are at it, but these people seemed to be thinking of other matters and I could tell their hearts weren’t in it. In between visits Laura and I sat without saying anything, side by side. Our arms were touching; we had no choice. The loveseat was very small. I hate to be touched. Laura was all the time twisting he
r purse straps or fiddling with its clasp, so that her elbow rubbed against my sleeve with a felty sound that made me jumpy. “Sit still, will you?” I said.

  “Oh, Amanda, I feel so lost in this place.”

  “Get ahold of yourself,” I told her. Her chin was denting. I reached out and squeezed her hand and said, “Never mind, we’ll go to the house soon and have a cup of tea. You’re tired is all.”

  “It’s true, I am,” she said. She has never had as much energy as I.

  Two ladies from Mother’s church dropped by. I knew their faces but had to cover up that I’d forgotten their names. Then Mother’s minister, and then Mrs. Jarrett, who has been a boarder at the house for years. A woman of quality, very gracious and genteel. She always wears a hat. She held out a gloved hand and said, “I shall think of your mother often, Miss Pauling, and remember her in my prayers. She was a very sweet person.” Now, why couldn’t all boarders be like that? Right on her heels came Miss Vinton, a faded stringy type who rents the south rear bedroom. The smallest room in the house; Mother charged less for it. “I’m sorry about your mother,” Miss Vinton said, but if she was so sorry you’d think she would have dressed to show it. She wore what she always does, a lavender cardigan over a gray tube of a dress, baggy mackintosh, boatlike Mary Janes on her great long feet. She shook hands like a man, bony hands with straight-edged nails and nicotine stains. Rides a bicycle everywhere she goes. You know the kind. “Well, it was very thoughtful of you to come, Miss Vinton,” I said, but meanwhile I threw a good sharp glance at her clothing to show I had taken it in. If she noticed, she didn’t care. Just gave me a horse-toothed smile. I suppose she thinks we have something in common, both being spinsters in our forties, but thank heaven that is where the resemblance ends. I have always taken care to keep my dignity intact.

  At six in the evening we went home. The streets were black and wet, with no taxi in sight. We walked all ten blocks. Laura was crying again. She kept blowing her nose and murmuring little things I couldn’t hear, what with the traffic swishing by and my rainscarf crackling, but I don’t imagine that I missed anything. Instead of answering I just marched along, keeping tight hold of my purse and watching for puddles. Even so, my stockings got spattered. The rowhouses had been darkened by the rain and looked meaner and grimmer than ever.