Noah's Compass

by Anne Tyler

  “Why, yes,” Barbara said, but now she sounded doubtful.

  “I cannot believe this,” Xanthe told Liam.

  Liam said, “Pardon?”

  “First you let her stay there all summer. You say, ‘Okay, Kitty, whatever you like. By all means, Kitty. Whatever your heart desires, Kitty.’ Little Miss Princess Kitty lolling about with her deadbeat boyfriend.”

  Liam said, “Yes? And?”

  “When you never let me live with you!” Xanthe cried. “And I was just a child! And you were all I had! I was way younger than Kitty is when you and Barbara split up. You left me behind with a woman who wasn’t even related to me and off you went, forever!”

  Liam felt stunned.

  He said, “Is that what you’ve been mad about?”

  Barbara said, “Oh, Xanthe, I feel related. I’ve always felt you were truly my daughter; you must know I have.”

  “This is not about you, Barbara,” Xanthe said in a gentler tone. “I have no quarrel with you. But him—” And she turned back to Liam.

  “I thought I was doing you a favor,” Liam said.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You had your two little sisters there, and you seemed so happy, finally, and Barbara was so loving and openhearted and warm.”

  “Why, thank you, Liam,” Barbara said.

  He stopped in mid-breath and glanced at her. She was looking almost bashful. But he needed to concentrate on Xanthe, and so he turned back. He said, “Epictetus says—”

  “Oh, not him again!” Xanthe exploded. “Damn Epictetus!” And she jumped up and began to stack her dishes.

  Liam gave her a moment, and then he started over. In his quietest and most pacifying voice, he said, “Epictetus says that everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne and one by which it cannot. If your brother sins against you, he says, don’t take hold of it by the wrong he did you but by the fact that he’s your brother. That’s how it can be borne.”

  Xanthe made a tssh! sound and clanked her bread plate onto her dinner plate.

  “I’m trying to say I’m sorry, Xanthe,” he said. “I didn’t know. I honestly didn’t realize. Can’t you find it in your heart to forgive me?”

  She snatched up her silverware.

  In desperation, he pushed his chair back and slid forward until he was kneeling on the patio. He could feel the unevenness of the flagstones through the fabric of his trousers; he could feel the ache of misery filling his throat. Xanthe froze, gaping at him, still holding her dishes. “Please,” he said, clasping his hands in front of him. “I can’t bear to know I made such a bad mistake. I can’t endure it. I’m begging you, Xanthe.”

  Jonah said, “Poppy?”

  Xanthe set her dishes down and took a grip on his arm. “For God’s sake, Dad, get up,” she told him. “What on earth! You’re making a fool of yourself!” She pulled him to a standing position and then bent to brush off his knees.

  “Goodness, Liam,” Barbara said mildly. She plucked a leaf from his trousers. All around him, it seemed, there was a flutter of pats and murmurs. “What will you think of next?” Xanthe asked, but she was guiding him back to his chair as she spoke.

  He sank onto the chair feeling exhausted, like a child who had been through a crying spell. He looked sideways at Jonah and forced himself to smile.

  “So,” he said. “Shall we have some lunch?”

  Wide-eyed, Jonah pushed a bowl of potato salad a few inches closer to him.

  “Thank you,” Liam said. He ladled a spoonful onto his plate.

  The two women returned to their seats, but then they just sat watching him.

  “What?” Liam asked them.

  They didn’t answer.

  He chose a deviled egg from a platter and set it on his plate. He reached for a tuna-salad sandwich that had been cut in a dainty triangle.

  It occurred to him that here he was, finally, dining with a couple of Picnic Ladies after all.

  13

  At the window end of the Threes’ room stood a long wooden table that was known as the Texture Table. Every morning as the children came in they headed for the Texture Table first to see what activity had been set up for them. Sometimes they found dishpans of water, and cups and pitchers for pouring. Sometimes they found sand. Often there were canisters of modeling clay, or bins of dried beans and pasta, or plastic shapes, or fingerpaints. Fingerpaints were Liam’s least favorite. He was supposed to monitor the Texture Table while Miss Sarah peeled the newer arrivals away from their mothers, and on fingerpaint days he spent all his time stopping the little boys from laying tiny red and blue handprints up and down the little girls’ dresses, and across the seats of the miniature chairs, and in each other’s hair. It was Liam’s opinion that fingerpaints ought to be abolished.

  Miss Sarah, however, believed that fingerpainting expanded the soul. Miss Sarah was full of such theories. (Overly full, if you asked Liam.) She seemed about twelve years old, and she wore jeans to work, and her round, freckled face generally bore a smudge of ink or chalk or felt-tip pen. She told Liam that fingerpainting was especially beneficial for children who were too fastidious—too “uptight,” as she put it. Most of the uptight ones were girls. They would tug at Liam’s sleeve with tears in their eyes, with looks of outrage on their faces, and say, “Zayda, see what Joshua did?”

  Then Liam would have to assure them that the paints would wash out, after which he would steer Joshua (or Nathan, or Ben) by the shoulders to the other end of the table. “Here, try the tractor,” he would say. “Run the tractor through this puddle of purple and you can make purple tread marks.”

  He never knew ahead of time what the Texture Table would hold, because his hours were eight till three and the next day’s table was not set up until late in the afternoon, after the cleaning staff had come through. So every morning when he arrived, he approached the table feeling mildly curious. After all, it might be a real surprise—something they hadn’t encountered before, a donation from a parent or a local business. Once it was a huge supply of bubble wrap. The children had immediately grasped the possibilities. They had set to work popping, popping bubbles with their little pincer fingers, snap-snap-snap all up and down the table. Even Liam popped a few. There was something very satisfying about it, he found. Then Joshua and his best friend, Danny, conceived a plan to roll up the sheets of wrap and wring them out like dishcloths, popping dozens of bubbles at once, and from there they moved on to setting the rolls on the floor and stamping on them with both feet. “You’re hurting our ears!” the little girls cried, covering their ears with their hands. “Zayda, make them stop!”

  Liam was baffled by the children’s unquestioning trust in him. From the first day of school, it was “I have to pee, Zayda,” and “Zayda, will you fix my ponytail?” No doubt at this age they would trust nearly anyone, but Miss Sarah said it also helped that he didn’t act all fake-chirpy with them. “You talk in a normal grumbly voice,” she said. “Kids like it when grownups don’t try too hard.”

  Though she herself clearly found Liam a bit lacking.

  On Halloween the Texture Table bore pumpkins with their tops cut off, and the children reached in up to their elbows and scooped out fistfuls of seeds and fibers. Then they drew faces on the pumpkins with black markers, because knives, of course, were not allowed.

  At Thanksgiving they had gourds of all shapes and colors and sizes, some smooth and some pebbly and warty. (But there wasn’t a lot you could do with gourds, it soon emerged.)

  For Hanukkah they made menorahs out of a special clay that could be baked in a regular oven. These were just humped glazed bands with nine holes for candles—nothing fancy. Liam incised the children’s names on the bottoms of their creations, and then while they were having Sharing Time he carried the menorahs in a cardboard box to the kitchen where he and Miss LaSheena, the cook, laid them one by one in the preheated oven. The clumsy little objects—streaky and misshapen, their holes obviously drilled by very small fingers—seemed to
give off some of the children’s own fervor and energy. Liam turned over an especially garish purple-and-green affair with five extra holes. Joshua, he read. He might have known.

  It came as news to him that small children maintained such a firm social structure. They played consistent roles in their dealings with each other; they held fierce notions of justice; they formed alliances and ad hoc committees and little vigilante groups. Lunches were parodies of grownups’ dinner parties, just with different conversational topics. Danny held forth at length on spaghetti’s resemblance to earthworms, and some of the little girls said, “Eww!” and pushed their plates away, but then Hannah—first clearing her throat importantly—delivered a discourse on a chocolate-covered ant she’d once eaten, while shy little Jake watched everybody admiringly from the sidelines.

  At nap time they spread their sleeping bags in rows—Hello Kitty, Batman, Star Wars sleeping bags—and instantaneously conked out, as if done in by the passions of the morning. It was Liam’s job to watch over them while Miss Sarah took her break in the teachers’ lounge. He sat at her desk and surveyed their little flung-down bodies and listened to the silence, which had that ringing quality that comes after too much noise. He could almost hear the noise still: “That’s not fair!” and “Can I have a turn?” and Miss Sarah reading A. A. Milne aloud: “James, James, Morrison, Morrison, Weatherby George Dupree …”

  And the chink! of Eunice’s earring as it dropped onto her dinner plate.

  He had lost his last chance at love; he knew that. He was nearly sixty-one years old, and he looked around at his current life—the classroom hung with Big Bird posters, his anonymous apartment, his limited circle of acquaintances—and knew this was how it would be all the way till the end.

  King John was not a good man, he had his little ways, and sometimes no one spoke to him for days and days and days.

  It seemed to be expected each Christmas that he should buy Jonah a gift. This year he settled on a jigsaw puzzle showing a mother and baby giraffe. He believed Jonah had a special fondness for giraffes. The grownups in the family no longer exchanged gifts; or maybe they did exchange gifts but they didn’t tell Liam about it, which was fine with him. Louise and Dougall brought Jonah by on Christmas Eve afternoon, and Liam served instant cocoa with the kind of marshmallows that he knew Jonah preferred—the miniatures rather than the big, puffy ones.

  Jonah seemed very big compared with the three-year-olds Liam saw daily. (He was nearly five by now.) He wore a Spider-Man jacket that he refused to take off. Louise said it was an early Christmas present. “We’re trying to spread out the deluge,” she said. “His other grandparents go way overboard.”

  “Well, in that case maybe he could open my present early too,” Liam said.

  “Can I?” Jonah asked, and Louise said, “Why not.”

  She was sitting in an armchair while Dougall, a tubby, soft, blond boy of a man, was squeezed into the rocker. Liam always had the impulse to avert his eyes from Dougall out of kindness; he seemed so uncomfortable in his own body.

  Jonah really liked his present. Or at least, he said he did. He said, “Giraffes are my favorite animals, next to elephants.”

  “Oh,” Liam said. “I didn’t know about the elephants.”

  “Go ahead and give him his present,” Louise told Jonah.

  “I have a present?” Liam asked.

  “He’s old enough now to learn that giving goes both ways,” Louise said.

  “I made it myself,” Jonah told him. He was pulling it from his jacket pocket—a small flat rectangle wrapped in red tissue. “Why don’t I just unwrap it for you,” he said.

  “That would be very helpful,” Liam said.

  Jonah was so eager that he flung bits of tissue everywhere. Eventually he uncovered a bookmark decorated with pressed leaves. “See,” he said, placing it on Liam’s knee, “first you glue the leaves to the paper and then the teacher sticks this clear stuff over the top of them with her hot shiny metal thingamajig.”

  “That’s called an iron,” Louise said, clutching her hair. “I’m mortified.”

  “I’ll use it right away,” Liam told Jonah.

  “Do you like it?”

  “I not only like it; I need it.”

  Jonah looked pleased. “I told you,” he said to his mother.

  “He insisted it was you who should get that,” Louise told Liam. “I believe it was originally supposed to be a parent gift.”

  “Well, too bad,” Liam said merrily. “It’s mine now.”

  Jonah grinned.

  “Where’s Kitty?” Dougall asked Liam. (His first utterance since “Hi.”)

  “Um, she’s at Damian’s, I believe.”

  Louise said, “What do you mean, you believe?”

  “Well, actually I know. But she’s due home any second. She said she’d be here for your visit.”

  She had promised to help with the entertaining, Liam remembered wistfully. (He sometimes found Dougall a bit difficult to converse with.)

  “That girl is running hog wild,” Louise told him.

  “Oh, no, no; by and large she’s been very responsible. This is just the exception that proves the rule.”

  “You know, I’ve never understood that phrase,” Louise said thoughtfully. “How could an exception prove the rule?”

  “Yes, I see your point. Or ‘honored in the breach rather than in the observance.’ ”

  “What?”

  “That’s another one that seems to contradict itself.”

  Louise said, “When I was—”

  “Or ‘arbitrary,’ ” Liam said. “Ever notice how ‘arbitrary’ has two diametrically opposite meanings?”

  He was beginning to find entertaining easier than he had envisioned.

  “When I was Kitty’s age,” Louise persevered, “I wasn’t allowed to go out on Christmas Eve. Mom said it was a family holiday and we had to all be together.”

  “Oh, I can’t imagine that,” Liam said. “Your mother never made a big to-do over Christmas.”

  “She most certainly did. She made a huge to-do.”

  “Then how about the time she gave away the tree?” Liam asked.

  “She what?”

  “Have you forgotten? Myrtle Ames across the street came by in a tizzy one Christmas morning because her son had suddenly decided to visit and she didn’t have a tree. Your mom said, ‘Take ours; we’ve already had the use of it.’ I was in the side yard collecting firewood and all at once I saw your mom and Myrtle, carrying off our Christmas tree.”

  “I don’t remember a thing about it.”

  “It still had all its decorations on,” Liam said. “It still had its angel swaying on top, and tinsel and strings of lights. The electric cord was trailing on the asphalt behind them. The two of them were doubled over in their bathrobes and scurrying across the street in this secret, huddled way.”

  He started laughing. He was laughing out of surprise as much as amusement, because he hadn’t remembered this himself until now and yet it had come back to him in perfect detail. From where? he wondered. And how had he ever forgotten it in the first place? The trouble with discarding bad memories was that evidently the good ones went with them. He wiped his eyes and said, “Oh, Lord, I haven’t thought of that in years.”

  Louise was still looking dubious. Probably she would have gone on arguing, but just then Kitty walked in and so the subject was dropped.

  It didn’t bother Liam that he would be spending Christmas Day on his own. He had a new book about Socrates that he was longing to get on with, and he’d picked up a rotisserie chicken from the Giant the day before. When he dropped Kitty off at Barbara’s in midmorning, though, she seemed struck by a sudden attack of conscience. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?” she asked after she got out of the car. She leaned in through the window and asked, “Should I be keeping you company?”

  “I’ll be fine,” he said, and he meant it.

  He waved to Xanthe, who had come to the front door, and she waved
back and he drove away.

  If only the roads could always be as empty as they were today! He sailed smoothly up Charles Street, managing to slip through every intersection without a stop. The weather was warm and gray, on the verge of raining, which made people’s Christmas lights show up even in the daytime. Liam approved of Christmas lights. He especially liked them on bare trees, deciduous trees where you could see all the branches. Although he couldn’t imagine going to so much trouble himself.

  In his apartment complex, the parking lot was deserted. Everybody must be off visiting relatives. He parked and let himself into the building. The cinderblock foyer was noticeably colder than outside. When he opened his own door, the faint smell of cocoa from yesterday made the apartment seem like someone else’s—someone more domestic, and cozier.

  Before he settled in with his book, he put the chicken in the oven on low and he exchanged his sneakers for slippers. Then he switched on the lamp beside his favorite armchair. He sat down and opened his book and laid Jonah’s bookmark on the table next to him. He leaned back against the cushions with a contented sigh. All he lacked was a fireplace, he thought.

  But that was all right. He didn’t need a fireplace.

  Socrates said … What was it he had said? Something about the fewer his wants, the closer he was to the gods. And Liam really wanted nothing. He had an okay place to live, a good enough job. A book to read. A chicken in the oven. He was solvent, if not rich, and healthy. Remarkably healthy, in fact—no back trouble, no arthritis, no hip replacements or knee replacements. The cut on his scalp had healed so that he could feel just the slightest raised line, barely wider than a thread. His hair had grown back to hide it completely from view. And the scar on his palm had shrunk so that it was only a sort of dent.

  He could almost convince himself that he’d never been wounded at all.

  A CONVERSATION WITH ANNE TYLER

  Random House Reader’s Circle: What led you to write this story? Was there a particular event or person that triggered the idea for this novel?

  Anne Tyler: I was drifting off to sleep one night when I heard a strange creak. I thought, “What if it’s a burglar, coming to conk me over the head?” and then I thought, “Oh, well, if he conks me over the head I won’t know about it anyway.” This started me on a long, meandering reverie, and by the time I was fully asleep I had the seeds of Noah’s Compass. I might have let it slip away except for the last line of the book, which came to me that night and which seemed to sum up everything about Liam’s life.