Noah's Compass (21 page)

Noah’s Compass: A Novel

10

Liam’s father lived off Harford Road, in a neighborhood of unassuming little cottages from the 1940s with drab clapboard siding, squat front porches, and carefully kept plots of grass. Liam could have found the place in his sleep, and not only because it was a straight shot out Northern Parkway. He had been traveling there since his teens. In fact, it was the first address he’d ever driven to, the first day he had his license. He’d asked permission to borrow the family car and then made his escape (was how he thought of it), gripping the steering wheel with both hands and constantly checking the rearview mirror as his driver’s ed instructor had taught him, but the faint tingle down his spine had come less from new-driver nerves than from the knowledge that he was betraying his mother. She would have been so distressed if she had known where he was going. She was, in general, a woman easily distressed. “That hurts my feelings” was her most characteristic remark. Also, “I just don’t seem to have any appetite,” as she pushed her plate away sadly after Liam had done something to disappoint her. He had disappointed her often, although he had tried his best not to.

The scenery hadn’t changed much in all these years. Even the flowers in the yards had a dated look—ball-shaped clumps of blue or white on bushes pruned into balls themselves.

There was an abundance of lawn ornaments—plaster gnomes and fawns and families of ducks, birdbaths, windmills, reflective aluminum gazing globes, wooden cutouts of girls in sunbonnets bending over the flower beds with their wooden watering cans. Liam’s father’s yard had a miniature pony cart planted with red geraniums and hitched to a plaster pony.

Liam parked behind his father’s great long barge of a Chevy and walked up to the porch.

He hadn’t phoned ahead. He never did. In his youth he had been aiming for an offhand, hap-penstance effect, and by now it was a tradition. Anyhow, the couple always seemed to be at home. Bard Pennywell had retired long ago from Sure-Tee Insurance, and Esther Jo had been asked to leave back when they got married.

It was Esther Jo who answered the doorbell. “Liam!” she said. They had never developed the habit of kissing when they met. For Liam as a teenager, she had seemed too dangerous, too obviously sexy for him to risk it. By now she was a puffy, pigeon-shaped woman in her early seventies, wearing a pinafore apron and cloth mules, but if you knew to look for the clues—the finger waves pressed into her faded blond hair, the eyebrows plucked to unsteady threads—you could still detect the office glamour girl she had once been.

“I hope I haven’t come at a bad time,” Liam told her.

“No, no, not at all. Your dad was just—Bard? It’s Liam! Your dad was just mowing the grass out back. Not that we have much to mow, these days. Hasn’t it been dry! I’ve forgotten what rain feels like, almost.”

She was leading Liam into the living room, which always struck him as an oddly girlish place. A row of stuffed animals lined the brocade love seat, and the dark wooden bookcase held an array of dolls in old-fashioned dresses, with crinolines and pantaloons peeking out from under their hems.

Liam settled in an armchair, but he stood again when his father entered the room. “Well, hi there, stranger!” his father said. He wore a crisply ironed shirt and a striped tie; he wasn’t the kind of man who dressed casually even to mow the lawn. Unlike Liam, he had thinned and shrunk as he aged, and the top of his head was completely bald, his hair no more than two tufts of white bracketing a narrow, deeply wrinkled face.

As they shook hands, Liam said, “I just thought I’d stop by and see how you were doing.”

“We’re doing fine! Not bad at all! This is a nice surprise, son.” Bard lowered himself onto the love seat, reaching behind him without looking to move aside a teddy bear in a cheerlead-er costume. “How’ve you been? How’re the girls?”

“Everyone’s fine,” Liam said, sitting back down. “They send their love.”

Or they would have, he reasoned, if they had known he was coming here. There was almost no contact between the two parts of Liam’s family.

“I’m just going to fetch some iced tea,” Esther Jo said. She had her arms folded tightly under her bosom, as if she felt the need to warm herself. “You two sit right where you are. Don’t get up! Just sit right here and have a nice talk. I’m going to leave you to it.”

She left the room, her mules making whispery sounds on the floorboards.

“I’d have thought you’d be at work now,” Liam’s father said, glancing at his watch. It was shortly before noon, Liam knew without checking. “Is summer school finished already?”

“I’m not doing that this year,” Liam said.

“Ah. Needed a break, did you.”

“Well … and I’ve been busy moving.”

“Moving! Where to?”

“A smaller place, up near the Beltway. Remind me to give you the phone number.”

His father nodded. “We should move,” he said. “Get shed of all this yard work. But, I don’t know, your stepmother loves her house so.”

Since Liam could never quite connect Esther Jo with the term “stepmother,” he experienced a little blank spell before he said, “Oh. Well, that’s understandable.”

“She says, ‘Where would I put all my pretty things? Where would my sister stay when she visits?’”

“It’s not as if an apartment couldn’t have a guestroom,” Liam said.

“No, but, you know.”

“In fact, I’ve got Kitty staying with me at this very moment.”

“Do you now!” His father smoothed the point of his t
ie.

Really the two of them had nothing to say to each other. Why did Liam have to learn this all over again on every visit?

They tried, though. Both of them tried. His father said, “How is Kitty, by the way?”

“She’s fine,” Liam said. “She’s working this summer in a dentist’s office.”

“Thinking of being a dental hygienist, is she.”

“Why, no. It’s just a summer job, is all. Filing charts.”

His father cleared his throat. “And your sister?” he asked.

“She’s fine too.”

Liam found himself listening for some sound from the kitchen, wondering when Esther Jo would be coming back to rescue them. “I actually haven’t seen Julia in a while,” he said.

“Me neither,” his father said, and he gave a dry cough of a laugh, although his face remained unsmiling. (He hadn’t seen Julia in forty-some years, and even then it was just because he’d shown up uninvited at her high school graduation.) He shifted in his seat slightly, as if he regretted his little joke, and smoothed his tie again.

“I’ve been laid off at St. Dyfrig,” Liam said.

At least it was a conversational topic.

“Laid off!”

“They’re folding their two fifth grades into one class next year.”

“But you’ve been there forever!”

“Just about,” Liam said.

“Don’t you have seniority?”

“Oh, well, I don’t know. That’s not how it works there.”

“How does it work?”

“I don’t know, I told you,” Liam said. He looked gratefully toward the kitchen, from where he heard the clink of ice cubes approaching.

“Real brewed tea!” Esther Jo announced, appearing with a tray. “I have to say I’ve just never held with instant. Seems to me instant has a sort of dusty taste.” She set the tray on the coffee table and distributed a tall glass to each of them. In the interim, she had put on lipstick.

Her shiny, cherry-red lips reminded Liam of the days when she and his father were first together, when she had been movie-star pretty in her buxom sweater sets and her tightly packed straight skirts with the kick pleats.

Wasn’t it amazing, he thought, that even a species as supposedly evolved as the human race was still so subject to biology. And now here they sat—his ancient father shriveled to a husk, the femme fatale’s swollen feet stuffed into calico mules.

“Liam’s lost his job,” Bard told Esther Jo.

“Oh, no, Liam!” Esther Jo said.

Liam said, “Yep.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Well, I’m thinking that over.”

“You just know somebody’s going to snatch you up in half a second,” she told him. “How about one of the public schools? They’re dying for good teachers in the public schools.”

“I’m not certified, though,” Liam said.

“Well, something’s going to come along, I’m sure of it. You know what?” she said, setting down her glass. “I should tell your fortune.”

“Oh, yes, hon, good idea,” Bard told her. “You haven’t done that in a long time.”

“Not for me, at any rate,” Liam said.

He remembered her telling his fortune when he’d been applying to graduate schools. She had said he would go to a place that was good for him professionally but not personally. What was that all about? you’d have to ask, but never mind; at least if she told his fortune now it would give them something to fill the silence with. He said, “Would you be willing?”

“Well, if I still know how,” she said. “Seems like the older all our friends get, the less they wonder about. I can’t think when was the last time … Betty Adler, maybe. Was it Betty?” she asked Bard. “Betty was wanting to know if she should move to New Mexico to be near her married daughter. Here, let me skootch this footstool around.”

She slid the footstool over in front of Liam and settled on it, slanting her knees decorously to one side. This close, she gave off a faint scent of roses. “Show me your hands,” she com-manded, and Liam held his hands out to her obediently. She took hold of them both at the base of his fingers and bent them slightly backward to flatten them. Her own fingers were chilled and dampish from her iced-tea glass. She said, “Now, first what I like to do is—oh!”

She was staring at his left palm—the gnarly line of his scar.

“What happened?” she asked him.

“I had a little accident.”

She made a clucking sound, looking dazed. “Well, this just skews everything every which way,” she said. “I never ran into such a thing before.”

“It’s only a scar,” Liam told her. For some reason, he felt it was important to carry through with this now. “I don’t see why it would make any difference.”

“But am I supposed to treat it like a brand-new line, or what? And how do I read what’s underneath it? I can’t tell what’s underneath it! I mean, your left hand is your whole entire past! I wonder if one of my books deals with this.”

“If it’s my past, why do we care?” Liam asked. “We just want to know about my future.”

“Oh, you can’t read one without the other,” Esther Jo told him. “They’re intermingled. They bounce off of each other. That’s what the amateurs fail to understand.”

She released his hands with a dismissive little pat that gave Liam a sense of rejection, absurdly enough.

“Let’s see if I can explain this,” she said. “You know how farmers can predict what kind of winter they’ll have by looking at the acorns and berries? Those acorns and berries are the way they are because of what has gone before—how much rainfall there’s been and et cetera,
et cetera
. A whole lot depends on the weather that’s already happened. And the farmers know that.”

She gave a quick, self-confirming nod.

“Well, just the same way, a real fortune-teller—and I’m not one to brag, but I am a real fortune-teller; I’ve just always had the gift, somehow—a real fortune-teller knows that your future depends on your past. It keeps shifting about; it’s not carved in stone. It keeps bouncing off whatever happened earlier. So, no, I can’t do a thing without seeing what’s in your left palm.”

And she sat back on her footstool with an annoyingly smug expression and laced her fingers around her knees.

Liam said, “Couldn’t you at least give it a try?”

She shook her head vigorously.

“You know what they say,” she told him. “‘Those who forget the past tend to regret the future.’”

“What?”

Bard said, “Aw, now, hon. Seems to me you might this once make an exception.”

“It’s not a matter of choice,” she told him.

He said, “At least it would help us to pass the time, look at it that way.”

“Pass the time!” she said. She stared at him. “Have I not just told you I’m a real fortune-teller?”

“Oh, well, real; ha-ha …”

“Do you not know I’ve been reading people’s futures since I was seven?”

“The boy was only wondering where to find a job, Esther Jo.”

Liam said, “Oh, no, it’s not important.” Now he felt foolish, as if he were, in fact, a “boy”

begging for crumbs of wisdom. “I was just curious,” he said. “I know it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Doesn’t mean anything!” Esther Jo echoed.

“Or, rather … of course it means something, but …”

How had things reached such a state? But it wasn’t his fault. He honestly didn’t think he should be shouldering the blame for this. He looked across at his father, who seemed unper-turbed.

“Well, silly me, right?” Esther Jo said. “Silly me to think you-all would take it seriously.”

She jumped up from the footstool, more spryly than you would expect from a woman her age, and stalked back to her chair and flung herself into it. “I don’t know why I bothered,” she told the ceiling.

“Oh, princess,” Bard said mildly. “Can’t we just have a nice visit? Drink your tea.”

“I’m not thirsty,” she said, still addressing the ceiling.

“Come on, hon. Be nice.”

She didn’t answer, but she picked up her glass and took a sip, finally.

Liam said, “Well, anyhow, I should be running along. I just wanted to pop in and say hello.”

Bard looked relieved. “We appreciate that,” he said. “Always good to see you, son.”

He and Liam stood up, but Esther Jo stayed seated, gazing down into her glass. Liam said, “Thank you for the tea, Esther Jo.”

“You’re welcome, I’m sure,” she murmured, still not raising her eyes.

Bard clapped him on the shoulder and told him, “I’ll see you out.”

Ordinarily Liam would have protested, but he allowed it this time. As they descended the porch steps, he said, “I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings.”

Bard said, “Oh, well,” and looked off toward the pony cart as if he had never noticed it before. Liam felt disappointed; he’d been hoping (he saw now) for his father to say something significant, give some clue about his life.