Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler Page B

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