Noah’s Compass: A Novel

by Anne Tyler

  “Half a second exactly,” the doctor said, and the undertone of amusement seemed to have returned to his voice.

  Liam had on a more casual outfit than he would normally wear in public: a stretched-out polo shirt and khakis with one torn belt loop. No time to change, though. All he did was switch his slippers for sneakers. Bending down to tie them made his head throb, which he welcomed. He wanted as many symptoms as possible if he was presenting his case to a doctor.

  In the parking lot, the throbbing in his head was bothersome enough to make him try to slide straight-backed into his car, bending only at the knees. He had just made it onto the seat when a woman shrieked, “What are you doing?”

  He turned to find an aged blue sedan pulled up behind him. His middle daughter was glaring at him through her open side window, and his grandson sat in the back. “Why, Louise,” Liam said. “Good to see you! Sorry, but I’m in a bit of a—”

  “You know you’re not supposed to be driving!”

  “Oh.”

  “They told you at the hospital! I came all the way over here in case you needed some errands run.”

  “Well, isn’t that nice of you,” he said. “Maybe you could take me to the neurologist’s office.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Down on St. Paul,” he said. He was climbing out of his car now, trying once again not to lower his head by so much as an inch. It was lucky Louise had happened along; he hadn’t realized how woozy he felt. He shuffled around the hood of her car to the passenger side and got in.

  “It’s going to pull like anything when you yank that bandage off,” Louise said, peering at his scalp.

  She had Barbara’s dark coloring but not her softness; there was always a sort of edge to her, especially when she squinted like this. Liam shrank away from her gaze and said, “Yes, well.” He began fumbling through his pockets. “Now, somewhere or other—” he muttered. “Aha.” He held up a torn-off corner from a Chinese menu. “Dr. Morrow’s address.”

  Louise glanced at it briefly before putting her car in gear. Liam turned to look at his grandson. “Jonah!” he said. “Hey, there!”

  “Hi.”

  “What’ve you been up to?”

  “Nothing.”

  In Liam’s opinion, the child lacked verve. He was … what, three years old? No, four; four and a half, but he still sat in one of those booster seats, docile as a little blond puppet, with a teddy bear clutched to his chest. Liam considered starting on a whole new subject but it didn’t seem worth the effort, and eventually he faced forward again.

  Louise said, “I was thinking you might need groceries brought, or a prescription filled. Nobody mentioned a doctor’s appointment.”

  “This was sort of last-minute,” Liam told her.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No, no.”

  Louise made a wide U-turn and headed out the entrance-way ignoring several arrows pointing in the opposite direction. Liam gripped the dashboard but made no attempt to set her straight.

  “Although I do, ah, seem to be having a little trouble with my memory,” he said finally.

  He was hoping they might get into a discussion about it, but instead she said, “I guess it was pretty creepy staying in the apartment last night.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “Kitty was a bit nervous, though. I had to give her the bedroom.”

  This reminded him; he said, “I believe I owe you some money for the rug shampooer.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Louise said.

  “No, I insist,” he said. “How much was it?”

  “You can pay me back when you get a job,” she told him.

  “A job. Well …”

  “Have you filled out any applications yet?”

  “I’m not sure I even want to,” he said. “It’s possible I’ll retire.”

  “Retire! You’re sixty years old!”

  “Exactly.”

  “What would you do with yourself?”

  “Why, there’s plenty I could do,” he said. “I could read, I could think … I’m not a man without resources, you know.”

  “You’re going to sit all day and just think?”

  “Or also … I have options! I have lots of possibilities. In fact,” he said spontaneously, “I might become a zayda.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s an adjunct position at a preschool out on Reisters-town Road,” he said. He was proud of himself for coming up with this; he hadn’t thought of it in weeks. “One of the parents at St. Dyfrig mentioned there was an opening. They use senior citizens as, so to speak, grandparent figures in the younger children’s classrooms. Zayda is the Jewish word for grandfather.”

  “You aren’t Jewish, though.”

  “No, but the preschool is.”

  “And you aren’t a senior citizen, either. Besides, this sounds to me like a volunteer position. Are you sure it’s not volunteer?”

  “No, no, I would be paid.”

  “How much?”

  “Oh …” he said. Then he said, “What is it with you girls? All of a sudden you seem to think you have a right to pry into my finances.”

  “For good reason,” Louise told him. She slowed for a light. She said, “And don’t even get me started on the obvious irony, here.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Grandfather!” she said. “You, of all people!”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Do you even like small children?” she asked.

  “Of course I like them!”

  “Huh,” she said.

  Liam turned once more to look at Jonah. Jonah sent back a milky blue gaze that gave no indication what he was thinking.

  They entered the city limits and traveled through Liam’s old neighborhood—dignified, elderly buildings grouped around the Hopkins campus. Liam felt a pang of homesickness. Resolutely, he steered his thoughts toward the new place: its purity, its stripped-down angularity. Louise (a mind reader, like both of her sisters) said, “You could always move back.”

  “Move back! Why would I want to do that?”

  “I doubt your old apartment’s been rented yet, has it?”

  “I’m very content where I am,” he said. “I have a refrigerator now that dispenses water through the door.”

  Louise just flicked her turn signal on. Behind her, Jonah started singing his ABCs in a thin, flat, tuneless voice. Liam turned to flash what he hoped was an appreciative smile, but Jonah was looking out his side window and didn’t notice.

  Imagine naming a child Jonah. That was surely Dougall’s doing—Louise’s husband. Dougall was some kind of fundamentalist Christian. He and Louise had dated all through high school and married right after graduation, over everyone’s objections, and then Dougall went into his family’s plumbing business while Louise, a straight-A student, abandoned any thought of college and gave birth in short order to Jonah. “Why Jonah?” Liam had asked. “What’s next: Judas? Herod? Cain?” Louise had looked puzzled. “I mean, Jonah’s was not a very happy story, was it?” Liam asked.

  All Louise said was, “I do know someone named Cain, in fact.”

  “Does he happen to have a brother?” Liam asked.

  “Not that I ever heard of.”

  “Inn-teresting,” Liam said.

  “Hmm?”

  Joining the Book of Life Tabernacle had done nothing for her sense of humor.

  Dr. Morrow’s office turned out to be just below Fender Street, in an ornate old building squeezed between a dry cleaner’s and a pawnshop. Parking, of course, was impossible. Louise said, “You hop on out and I’ll find a space around the block.” Liam didn’t argue. According to his watch, it was 9:10. He wondered if Dr. Morrow would restrict him to a mere five minutes.

  The lobby had a high, sculptured ceiling and a marble floor gridded with seams of brass. An actual person—an ancient black man in full uniform—operated the elevator, sitting on a wooden stool and sliding the accordion door shut with a white-gloved hand.
Liam was amazed. When the only other passenger, a woman in a silk dress, said, “Three, please,” he felt he had been transported back to his childhood, to one of the old downtown department stores where his mother could spend hours fingering bolts of fabric. “Sir?” the operator asked him.

  “Oh. Four, please,” Liam said.

  Four was jarringly modern, carpeted wall to wall in businesslike gray and lined overhead with acoustical tiles. A disappointment, but also a relief. (You wouldn’t want your neurologist to be too old-fashioned.)

  An entire column of doctors’ names marched down the plate-glass door of Suite 401, beneath larger lettering that read ST. PAUL NEUROLOGY ASSOCIATES. Even at this early hour, there were quite a few patients in the waiting room. They sat on molded plastic chairs under the bank of receptionists’ windows—a separate window for each doctor. Dr. Morrow’s receptionist had dyed black hair that made her look less cozy than she had sounded on the phone. The minute Liam gave her his name, she handed him a clipboard with a form to fill out. “I’ll need to make a copy of your insurance card, too, and your driver’s license,” she said. Liam had been sincere when he told Dr. Morrow he intended to pay, but somehow he still felt taken aback by the woman’s crass commercialism.

  The other patients were in terrible shape. Good Lord, neurology was a distressing specialty! One man shook so violently that his cane kept falling to the floor. A woman held an oversized child who seemed boneless. Another woman kept wiping her blank-faced husband’s mouth with a tissue. Oh, Liam should not be here. He had no business frittering away the doctor’s time on such a trivial complaint. But even so, he continued printing out his new address in large, distinct block letters.

  Louise and Jonah came in and settled across from him, although there were seats free on either side of him. Nobody would have guessed they had anything to do with him. They didn’t look his way, and Louise immediately started searching through the magazines on the table to her left. Eventually she came up with a children’s magazine. “Look!” she told Jonah. “Baby rabbits! You love baby rabbits!” Jonah clutched his teddy bear tightly and followed her pointing finger.

  To be honest, Liam thought, the Pennywells were a rather homely family. (Himself included.) Louise’s hair was too short and her face too angular. She had on boxy red pedal pushers, not a flattering style for anyone, and flip-flops that showed her long white bony feet. Jonah was breathing through his mouth and he wore a slack, stunned expression as he gazed down at the page.

  In a low, clear voice just inches from Liam’s right ear, a woman said, “Verity.”

  Liam started and turned.

  This was someone young and plump and ringleted, wearing a voluminous Indian-print skirt and cloddish, handmade-looking sandals. One hand was linked through the arm of an old man in a suit.

  Liam said, “What?”

  But she had already passed him by. She and the old man—her father?—were approaching Dr. Morrow’s receptionist. When they reached the window, she dropped the old man’s arm and stepped back. The old man told the receptionist, “Why, Verity! Good morning! Don’t you look gorgeous today!”

  The receptionist said, “Thank you, Mr. Cope,” and she lifted a hand to her dyed hair. “Just have a seat and Dr. Morrow will see you shortly.”

  When the couple turned from the window, Liam lowered his eyes so they wouldn’t know he’d been watching them. They took the two chairs next to Jonah. Louise was saying, “Just then, a big, big lion came out from behind the tree,” and neither she nor Jonah glanced in their direction.

  “Mr. Pennywell?” a nurse called from the far end of the room.

  Liam rose and went over to where she stood waiting. “How are you today?” she asked him.

  “Fine, thanks,” he said. “Or, I mean, sort of fine …” but she had already turned to lead him down a corridor.

  At the end of the corridor, in a tiny office, Dr. Morrow sat writing something behind an enormous desk. Liam would not have known him. The man had aged past recognition—his red hair a tarnished pink now, and his many freckles faded into wide beige splotches across his face. He wore a sports jacket rather than a white coat, and the only sign of his profession was the plaster model of a brain on the bookcase behind him. “Ah,” he said, setting down his pen. “Mr. Pennywell,” and he half rose in a creaky, stiff way to shake hands.

  “It’s good of you to make time for me,” Liam said.

  “No trouble at all; no trouble at all. Yes, you do have a bit of a nick there.”

  Liam turned the wounded side of his head toward the doctor, in case he might like to examine it more closely, but Dr. Morrow sank back onto his chair and laced his fingers across his shirtfront. “Let’s see: how long has it been?” he asked Liam. “Nineteen eighty, eighty-one …”

  “Eighty-two,” Liam told him. He was able to say for sure because it had been his last year at the Fremont School.

  “Twenty-some years! Twenty-four; good God. And you’re still teaching?”

  “Oh, yes,” Liam said. (No sense getting sidetracked by any long involved explanations.)

  “Still hoping to stuff a little history into those rascally Fremont boys,” Dr. Morrow said, chuckling in his new elderly way.

  “Well, ah, actually it’s St. Dyfrig boys now,” Liam admitted.

  “Oh?” Dr. Morrow frowned.

  “And, um, fifth grade.”

  “Fifth grade!”

  “But anyway,” Liam said hastily. “Tell me how Buddy’s doing.”

  “Well, these days we call him Haddon, of course.”

  “Why, would you do that?”

  “Well, Haddon is his name.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes, Haddon’s all grown up now—turned forty back in April, would you believe it? Has his own trucking company. Statewide. Very successful, considering.”

  “I’m delighted to hear it.”

  “You were awfully kind to him,” Dr. Morrow said, and all at once his voice sounded different—not so bluff and pompous. “I haven’t forgotten the patience you showed.”

  “Oh, well,” Liam said, shifting in his seat.

  “Yours was about the only course he managed to get fired up about, as I recall. Seneca! Wasn’t that who he wrote his paper on? Yes, we used to hear quite a lot about Seneca at the dinner table. Seneca’s suicide! Big news, as if it happened yesterday.”

  Liam gave a little laugh that came out sounding oddly like Dr. Morrow’s chuckle.

  “I’ll have to tell him I saw you,” Dr. Morrow said. “Haddon will get a kick out of that. But enough chitchat; let’s hear about your injury.”

  “Oh yes,” Liam said, as if that had not been uppermost on his mind the whole time. “Well, evidently I was struck on the head and knocked unconscious.”

  “Is that so! By someone you knew?”

  “Why no,” Liam said.

  “Lord, Lord, what’s the world coming to?” Dr. Morrow asked. “Have they caught the assailant?”

  “Uh, not that I’ve heard,” Liam said.

  The word assailant momentarily derailed him. It was one of those words you saw only in print, like apparel. Or slain. Or … what was that other word he’d noticed?

  “And yet they claim they’re working to make this city safer,” Dr. Morrow said.

  “Actually, I live in the county,” Liam told him.

  “Oh, really.”

  Exclaimed. That was another word you saw only in print.

  “But the point is,” Liam said, “I was hit and knocked unconscious, and I don’t remember anything more till I woke up in a hospital bed.”

  “They did a CT scan, I assume.”

  “That’s what I’m told.”

  “And they found no sign of intracranial bleeding.”

  “No, but …”

  Barbara used to say that he didn’t phrase things strongly enough when he visited his doctor. She’d ask, “Did you tell him about your back? Did you tell him you were in agony?” and Liam would say, “Well, I mentioned I
was experiencing some discomfort.” Barbara would roll her eyes. So now he leaned forward in his chair. “I have a very, very serious concern,” he said. “I really need to talk about this. I feel I’m going crazy.”

  “Crazy! You told me memory loss.”

  “I’m going crazy over my memory loss.”

  “What is it you don’t remember, exactly?”

  “Anything whatsoever involving the attack,” Liam said. “All I know is, I went to bed, I slid under my covers, I looked out the window … and pouf! There I am in a hospital room. A whole chunk of time has vanished. Someone broke into my apartment and I must have woken up, because they say I got this hand injury fighting off the … assailant. Then a neighbor called 911, and the police came and the ambulance, but every bit of that is absent from my mind.”

  “You do remember other things, though,” Dr. Morrow said. “The time before you went to bed. The time after you woke in the hospital.”

  “Yes, all of that. Just not the attack.”

  “Nor will you ever, I venture to say. People always hope for some soap-opera moment where everything comes back to them. But the memories surrounding a head trauma are gone forever, in most cases. As a matter of fact, you’re fairly unusual in recalling as much as you do. Some victims forget days and days leading up to the event, and they have only spotty recollections of the days afterward. Consider yourself fortunate.”

  “Fortunate,” Liam said, with a twist of his mouth.

  “And why would you even want to remember such an experience?”

  “You don’t understand,” Liam said.

  He knew he had used up his time. A new tension had crept into the room’s atmosphere; the doctor’s posture had grown more erect. But this was important. Liam gripped his knees. “I feel I’ve lost something,” he said. “A part of my life has been stolen from me. I don’t care if it was unpleasant; I need to know what it was. I want it back. I’d give anything to get it back! I wish I had someone like the … rememberer out in your waiting room.”

  Dr. Morrow said, “The what?”