Celestial Navigation by Anne Tyler Page B

cold heavy foreign object that his eyes refuse to focus upon.
    He was showing his mother’s bedroom to some strangers who must have rung the doorbell, although he could not rememberanswering it. A man, a very tall woman, and a little girl. “It’s not big enough for a family, I don’t believe,” he said.
    “You just said that,” said the man. “We just went
through
that.”
    “John,” said the woman. She turned to Jeremy. He sensed the motion even though he was looking at his mother’s lace curtains. She said, “Mr. Harris is just a friend. This room would be for me and my daughter.”
    “Oh yes.”
    “Is there a downstairs bathroom?”
    He couldn’t seem to fix his mind to her words.
    “Mr. Pauling?”
    His sisters had cleaned out his mother’s room, but they had not managed to remove her smell. It hung over everything, sweet and damp and dusty. Even the sunlight filtering through the curtains had something of her in it. She had always been translucent, filmy, matte-surfaced like the meshy patterns of light fluttering on the old flowered carpet. There was a lack of body to her that had made him anxious, even as a child, and at any sign of weakness or illness in her his anxiety grew so strong it changed to irritation. (“Jeremy!” she had cried, climbing the stairs, and she laid a veined and trembling hand to her chest while Jeremy climbed on with his heart pounding, terrified and resentful, pretending not to notice. When she fell, there was a soft sound like old clothes dropping. She had not had the weight to roll back down the stairs; she remained where she landed, in a crumpled heap. Jeremy went into the studio and over to the window, where he stood sweating and shaking for a very long time. He chipped at the windowsill with a fingernail, flaking off paint. Then he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, returned to the stairs, and sat down beside her to lift her by the shoulders.)
    “There is plenty of closet space,” the woman said. “Come look, John.”
    “You
look, Mary. Just tell me if you like it.”
    Hangers slid down a length of pipe. The child followed her mother, clutching a handful of her skirt. Jeremy was fond of children, and he would have liked to look at this one but she kept on standing too close to her mother. The mother was very beautiful; not someone he wanted to raise his eyes to. Beautiful women made him uneasy. He received his impressions of her from sidelong glances—brown hair worn in a bun, oval face, scoop-necked dress—and the image that he formed was like an illustration in an old-fashioned novel. The man was square-jawed and handsome, a cigarette ad. Only men like that are comfortable with beautiful women.
    “Do you supply the linen?” she asked.
    He thought of some nineteenth-century linen closet—ivory sheets in stacks, balls of hand-milled soap, a bunch of lavender dangling from a nail.
    “Mr. Pauling? Do you supply the linen?”
    “Linen. Yes.”
    “Well, I suppose we should take it,” she said.
    She was going through a pocketbook of some kind. Jeremy was staring at the nightstand. He saw a photograph of his father, laughing widely from a narrow silver frame. He saw his father lounging on the front stoop, slinging out majestic orders to the scary black men who worked for him. A hand nudged his arm. Crumpled dollar bills were passed to him one by one, as if they were the last of some treasure. He looked down, trying to think what was expected of him. “But the room,” he said.
    Everyone seemed to be waiting for his words, even the smallest person at the left-hand corner of his eye.
    “It’s not big enough for a family, I don’t believe,” he said.
    The man made an impatient gesture, turning sharply on one heel. The woman said, “But you don’t mind just me and the child here, do you?”
    “Child?” he said. He looked back at his father’s photograph. He tried to think what his father’s voice had sounded like, but it took a long time for him