Celestial Navigation

5. Fall, 1968: Miss Vinton

The way it used to be, I stayed home with the children while Jeremy took Mary to the hospital by taxi. This was before I had bought my little car. Mary would wake me in the night just to let me know I was in charge—“Now don’t get up!” she always said, but of course I did get up, I wouldn’t have missed the excitement for anything. I put on a bathrobe and ran downstairs to say goodbye, only then it would turn out that they weren’t quite ready to go yet. Mary was waiting at the front door with her overnight case and Jeremy was off trying to locate the house keys or change for the taxi. I kept Mary company. We just stood there smiling at each other. We beamed. Never mind that I am an old maid; I can still recognize a happy occasion when I see one. When Jeremy arrived, all worried and shaky, I would find his coat for him and help him into it. “Hurry now,” I’d say. “I hear the taxi. Don’t let him leave you.” I slid back bolts and flung open first the inner door and then the outer door, I burst into the frosty night air ahead of them. I wanted to shout out a fanfare: “Make way! Make way! We have a pregnant woman here! A baby is being born!” Instead I opened the door of the taxi, meanwhile holding my bathrobe collar shut with one hand. “You get in first,” I would tell Jeremy. He always had this moment of hesitation just then, but when I gave him a pat he would climb on in. Mary laid her cheek against mine, leaning across a whole table’s width of stomach and overnight case, which made us laugh. We would have laughed at anything, I believe. Mary glowed all over, lighting up the sidewalk. “Take care of Jeremy for me,” she always whispered. And then, aloud: “I’m off!” She climbed into the cab. She rolled down the window and leaned out, waving. “Goodbye, Miss Vinton! And thank you for getting up! I’m off! Goodbye!”

I bought my little car when my knees grew too rheumatic for bicycling. I chose a ‘51 DeSoto, not much to look at but very steady and reliable. This was when Mary was well into her fourth pregnancy. (Her fifth, counting Darcy.) “One thing,” I told her. “You can go to the hospital in style this time. Well, maybe not style, exactly, but at least you won’t have to depend on the Yellow Cab Company.” Secretly I was a little nervous. I must have checked the route to the hospital a dozen times, although it wasn’t far and I had often been before. I kept reminding Mr. Somerset, “Don’t go anywhere in November. Promise me, please.” He was supposed to watch the children while I was away. Now, Mr. Somerset had not been gone overnight in the fourteen years I’d known him, so you can see how edgy I must have been. I kept wishing that Julia Jarrett were still alive. Or that they had replaced her, at least — found another grandmotherly type for that room instead of turning it into a nursery. What kind of babysitter was an old man with a fondness for bourbon? By October, before Mary had even packed her suitcase, I had laid out a dress on the chair beside my bed and put a pair of shoes beneath it, all ready to hop into. I took to sleeping in tomorrow’s underwear. I kept dreaming that my car ran out of gas halfway to the hospital.

But it was mid-November, about four o’clock one morning, when the knock came on my door. I had been expecting it for so long that it hardly seemed real. I ran downstairs still fastening buttons and carrying my belt looped over my wrist, and there was Mary as calm as always, smiling up at me. She had on the blue maternity dress that she’d worn day in and day out for the majority of her married life, and over that the old black coat that didn’t meet across her stomach. “Are you all right?” I asked her.

“I’m fine.”

“How close are the pains?”

“Every four minutes.”

“Jeremy had better hurry,” I said.

“Oh, he’s not coming.”

“Not coming?”

“I didn’t wake him.”

I stared at her.

“Well, I do have you to help,” Mary said. “It’s not as if I have to manage the taxi any more.”

“Mary, he wouldn’t want to miss being with you now for all the world,” I told her. If there was one thing I was sure of, that was it. Why, that man would move heaven and earth for her! You have only to look at him to see how much he loves her. But there stood Mary shaking her head, planted squarely in front of me like little Abbie when she has made up her mind about something. “You don’t know how hard it is for him,” she said.

I did know. I probably knew better than she did, but I also believe that everyone has a right to take his own leaps. Of course, I didn’t tell Mary that. She has her rights too. And there might be other reasons I had no inkling of, so all I did was nod and bend to pick up her overnight case. “Suit yourself,” I said. “You got everything?”

“I think so.”

“Let’s go, then,” I said. It wasn’t even necessary to call Mr. Somerset — not with Jeremy at home.

But I felt that we were making a mistake, all the way to the hospital. Mary didn’t, apparently. She just looked out the window and talked about ordinary things — the house, the children. I have to admit I was relieved about that. I don’t like hearing too much of people’s personal lives. Sometimes she stopped speaking and her face would flatten and her eyes would get fixed on a point far away. That was the only sign she gave of being in labor. It wasn’t at all like in the movies, thank God. Then after a minute she would relax and go on with what she was saying before. “I wanted to get Pippi’s snowsuit out. That nylon jacket she has is not—”

“I’ll see to it.”

“I believe it’s in the trunk. It’s that old one of Abbie’s, you remember.”

“Yes, yes.”

I had never realized how long some traffic lights can take.

“And Darcy needs a note of permission, she’s going on a field trip.”

“I’ll write her one in the waiting room.”

“But how will you sign it? How will they know who Miss Vinton is?”

I had assumed I would simply forge Mary’s name, but since that didn’t seem to have occurred to her I came up with another answer. “I’ll give it to Jeremy to sign,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” Mary said. She turned and looked at me. Why did she suddenly become so beautiful? The corners of her mouth lifted, and she brushed her hair up off her neck and tipped her head back until it rested on the back of the seat. “Jeremy can do it,” she said. Then she closed her eyes, and the light changed to green. I nearly stripped all the gears, I was so anxious to get us moving again.

At the hospital they whisked Mary away in a wheelchair, and I went into a waiting room I found at the end of the hall. It was huge and barren-looking, with linoleum floors and vinyl furniture and a stiff bouquet of hothouse flowers on a coffee table. On one couch a bald man was stretched out asleep. I took a chair at the other end of the room from him, turned on a lamp, and wrote a note on the back of a shopping list: “To whom it may concern, Darcy Tell has my permission to go on a field trip today. Signed,” and I left a blank space for Jeremy’s signature. Then I sat back and stared at the blank space. I kept wondering if I should just go and phone him. Wouldn’t Mary be glad, after all, once he had come? I know that Jeremy is supposed to be the weak one in that couple but he might surprise some people: if you are so scared of so many things, sometimes you turn out even stronger than ordinary men. I took a dime from my purse, but then I reconsidered. I haven’t lived fourteen years on the edges of other people’s lives for nothing. I could never interfere like that. So I stayed in my seat. I spent the next hour chain-smoking and reading torn Life magazines whose photos seemed very dim and long ago, the way they always do in waiting rooms. Then someone said, “Miss Vinton?” and I looked up to find a doctor dressed in green standing in the doorway. “Are you Miss Vinton? Mrs. Pauling sent me to tell you,” he said. “She has a boy.”

I said, “A boy? Are you sure?”

Which made him smile, but you can’t really blame me. The first three babies were girls: Abigail, Philippa, and Hannah. They’d been planning for an Edward so long that the name was getting stale. I think all of us had given up hope. I said, “My, won’t Jeremy be surprised? I can’t wait to tell him!” but the doctor held up his hand and said, “That was the rest of her message. She’ll call her husband herself, she says. She wants to.”

“Oh, of course,” I said. “I didn’t think.”

I watched him walk off again. Then I looked down at the warm dime in the palm of my hand. Other people save dimes for weeks. They spend hours in the phone booth as soon as the baby is born, telling grandparents and aunts and uncles and friends. Who could I tell? As far as I knew Jeremy had one solitary sister left from all his family — Amanda, who kept her distance. (She never did get on with Mary.) I couldn’t see waking her at five-thirty in the morning. The only friends were the women Mary sat in the park with, behind a row of strollers. I didn’t even know their last names and possibly Mary didn’t either. So in the end I put the dime away again, and got up to leave. The bald man was still asleep on the couch. I hadn’t seen a single husband pacing the floor in his shirtsleeves. Things rarely work out the way the magazines would lead you to expect.

By the time I got home it was almost light, and the children were up. They keep the most amazing hours. Darcy was in the kitchen fixing cereal for the little ones, Abbie and Pippi were quarreling in the parlor, and Hannah was sitting in her high chair sucking her thumb. “Heavens,” I said to Darcy. “Who’s watching over you? Where’s everyone else?”

“In bed, I guess,” Darcy said.

“Didn’t Jeremy tell you you have a baby brother?”

“No.”

She was eleven at the time — a silent age.

“Well, you do,” I said.

“Well, nobody told us.”

“I believe they’re naming him Edward.”

“I knew that,” she said. “I’m the one that chose it.”

I’d forgotten. They let her choose all the names, to make her feel a part of things. It’s lucky they didn’t end up with a pack of Hepzibahs and Lancelots. I said, “Well, I think that’s a very fine choice, Darcy.”

“When do we get to see him?”

“In a few days.”

She poured milk into the cereal bowls and I went out to the parlor to separate the two who were quarreling. “All right, what’s going on here?” I said. It was something to do with a pack of bath salts. I put the pack on the mantel, wiped Pippi’s tears, and buttoned Abbie’s pajamas. Meanwhile, I was wondering who was in charge. I seemed to be the only grownup around. I still had my mackintosh on. I was stained with tears and pink bath salts, and in two hours I was due at the bookstore. Not that I would have minded staying with the children. I have offered to, for every birth. “Let Jeremy go on with his work,” I always tell Mary. “I’ll take some of my vacation time.” She says, “No, goodness, he can manage.” Now I couldn’t see a sign of him. I got the two girls seated with their cereal and then I went into the dining room and tapped on Jeremy’s door. He and Mary share his mother’s old room. But there was no answer, and finally I looked inside. All I found was an empty bed, unmade. Bedclothes trailing across the floor. I shut the door and went back to the kitchen. “All right, children,” I said. “It looks like we’re the ones holding the fort.” I passed out paper napkins, and fixed them hot cocoa while they sat eating around the kitchen table. They made quite a picture — Darcy so blond, the others brown-headed and round-faced and solemn. The younger ones were fairly close together in age — six, four, and two — and that morning it seemed to me that the littlest was much too little to have a new baby coming in. She was drinking from one of those training cups with a spout. Every time she took the cup out of her mouth she replaced it instantly with her thumb. Abbie and Pippi continued to fight. Darcy started bossing them around — a bad habit she has. Meanwhile Buddy came through, our current medical student, and grabbed an apple on his way out, and Mr. Somerset appeared but left when he saw the crowd. “Mr. Somerset! Wait,” I said. “Have you seen Jeremy?”

“Nope.”

“I bet you he’s in the studio,” Darcy said.

So while they were busy with breakfast I set off for the third floor. I took Darcy’s teacher’s note with me. I held it in front of me, like a ticket of admission, while I knocked. “Jeremy? It’s Mildred Vinton,” I said. No answer. I knocked again. They put a door on his studio when they moved the first two girls upstairs, to his old bedroom. It used to be that the whole house showed signs of his working, scraps littered everywhere and the smell of glue and construction paper, but the better his pieces get the more he shuts them away from us. Someday, I believe, Jeremy is going to be a very famous man, but it is possible that no one will be allowed to see his work at all by then, not even strangers in museums.

I said, “Jeremy? Are you in there?” Then I said, “Well, I’m not going to disturb you, but I do have to know if you’d like me to stay with the children today.”

Footsteps creaked across the floor. The door opened and there stood Jeremy, unshaven, in a round-necked moth-eaten sweater and a pair of baggy trousers. It was years since I had seen him looking so awful. The funny thing about Jeremy is that he never seems to age, he always has the same smooth plump face, but today that made it all the worse. He looked shocking, like a baby with a hangover. However, I pretended not to notice. “Morning, Jeremy,” I said. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you, Miss Vinton.”

When we heard they were married (and after we got over the surprise), and the house warmed up and we started using first names more, I asked them to call me Mildred but apparently that proved impossible. I am doomed to be Miss Vinton forever.

I stuck out my note, along with a ballpoint pen. “Could you sign this, please?”

He signed, but without even reading it so far as I could see. Then he handed it back. “You didn’t call me,” he said.

“Well, I — she asked me not to, Jeremy.”

“She didn’t even want me with her.”

I couldn’t think what to say. I looked off down the stairs, so as not to embarrass him. Finally I asked, “Would you like me to take care of the children today?”

“You think that I’m not up to it,” he said.

He startled me. I said, “Why, no, Jeremy, I know you are.”

“I can do things like that.”

“Of course, but — if you’re working on something.”

“I’m not working on anything at all.”

He shut the door again. What could I do? It seemed he was too abstracted for me to leave the little girls with him, but in the end that’s what I did — bathed and dressed and went off to the shop. At noon I couldn’t get away, but I called. The phone rang seven times before he answered. “Jeremy?” I said. “Is everything all right?”

“Why, yes.”

His voice sounded more like himself, and I could hear Pippi singing in the background. It seemed I had worried for no good reason.

In the afternoon I took off from work early and went to visit Mary. As you can imagine, I was an old hand at hospital visits by that time. I knew enough not to bring her flowers (extravagance makes her anxious) and to stop off at the nursery first so that I could tell her I’d seen the baby. (She always has me promise that everything is fine, no doctor has drawn me aside to whisper anything dire.) After I had looked at Edward a proper length of time I went down the hall to her ward, where I expected to find her chattering and smiling the way she always was after a baby, but she wasn’t that day. She was lying flat on her back, crying. All up and down the room were women with bows in their hair and lace on their bedjackets, talking softly to their husbands, and there was Mary crying. Well, I nearly left. I would have, if I could. When people cry I back off to give them privacy. But then she saw me and I was trapped. “Oh, Miss Vinton,” she said. She sat up quickly and darted her index fingers underneath her eyes, getting rid of the evidence. I pretended not to notice. “Got quite a son there,” I said. I wished I had brought flowers. Then I would have had something to fuss over, give her time to get her bearings. I said, “Were you asleep? Because I only stopped in for a moment. Wasn’t planning to stay. I’ll be back at the next—”

“I’ve upset Jeremy,” she said.

“Oh. Well, I’m sure he — he’ll get over it.”

“You were right. I should have told him.”

“I really don’t know much about such things,” I said. “I’m sure it will all get straight in the end.”

“I thought I was helping. All I did was hurt his feelings so badly I don’t know what he’ll do. I’ve never seen him so hurt. I called him and—”

Then she started crying again. She couldn’t even talk. I said, “Oh, well. Oh, well.” I spent a long time getting my mackintosh unbuttoned and draping it just so over the back of a chair.

“I called,” Mary said, getting hold of her voice, “and I told him — and he waited a long time and then he said, ‘I see.’ Then he — then—”

Her voice gave way. I felt helpless. I just knew she would lie awake hating herself for exposing her secrets this way. Could I make believe I hadn’t heard? That was ridiculous.

“Then he said, ‘Didn’t you want me with you, Mary?’ ”

“Well, of course you did,” I said, pulling down my sweater cuffs very carefully.

“I tried to make him see. ‘I always want you with me, Jeremy,’ I said, ‘but it’s not as if this is my first baby after all and I know how hard it is for you to—’ ”

Honesty: her one fault. There is such a thing as seeing too deeply, and then telling a man too much of what you see, but I don’t know when she’s going to find that out. “Look,” I wanted to say, “the biggest favor you can do for him is to take him at face value.” But I managed to keep quiet. I just handed her the tissue box and watched her blotting her tears. “This is a postnatal depression, I believe,” I told her finally. Mary laughed and then went on crying. “Shall I come back later?” I said.

“No, Miss Vinton, don’t go. Please don’t go. I promise I’ll stop this.”

It seemed unlikely that she would keep her promise, but I couldn’t think of any decent way to get out of the room. I settled back in my chair. “Now, I’ve been to see the baby,” I told her. “Seems quite healthy, I’d say from the looks of him.”

“Did you see him, Miss Vinton?”

“I told you. I’ve just been by the nursery.”

“I meant Jeremy. Did you see him?”

“Yes, this morning I did.”

“How did he look? Was he all right?”

“He was fine,” I told her. “Just fine.”

“They won’t let me use the phone again until I’m up and about,” Mary said, “and that won’t be till tomorrow. It’s out in the hall. All I want to do is ask how the children are, and get this misunderstanding straightened out. I can’t stand just lying here thinking that—”

“The children are managing beautifully,” I said.

“Are they doing what he tells them to?”

“Of course.”

“He doesn’t always know quite how to handle them, you see, and I worry that—”

“They’re fine,” I told her.

“He said he wanted to come visit me.”

“Oh, good, good,” I said. I thought that was a wonderful sign; before he had always left the visiting to me.

“I told him not to.”

“Mary Pauling! Why ever not?”

“It’s so hard for him,” Mary said. “I told him not to bother.”

Some people take a terribly long time learning things.

I went home and found everything in chaos — Buddy cooking spaghetti, Jeremy changing Hannah’s diaper, Mr. Somerset stroking the carpet with an old bent broom. There is something so pathetic about men trying to figure out the way a house works. “Here,” I said to Jeremy, “let me do that.” He had laid a clean diaper on the floor but he seemed to be having trouble getting Hannah to set herself down on it. I said, “At eight o’clock it will be visiting hour at the hospital. I’ll stay with the children while you go.”

“She doesn’t want me to,” he said. He looked at me with his eyes very wide and steady. It nearly broke my heart.

“Jeremy,” I said, “are you sure she doesn’t?”

“She asked me not to come.”

Then Hannah started wandering off toward a stack of blocks. I grabbed her. “Now listen, young lady,” I said, “this has gone far enough, do you hear?” Only Hannah, of course, was not really who I was mad at.

It is very difficult to live among people you love and hold back from offering them advice.

I have never been married and never planned to be, never had the inclination to be. Yet I don’t believe I am an unhappy person. I had a normal childhood, good parents, five fine brothers and sisters. I had the usual number of young men to come calling when I was the proper age. Still, I did not once consider the possibility of marrying any of them. If you were to ask my vision of the future back then, my favorite daydream, it was this: I would be reading a book alone in my room, and no one would ever, ever interrupt me. I realize how antisocial that sounds. But it seemed to me that my life was so crowded, when I was young. There were always so many people around. Everyone knew everyone’s secrets. And then later, when my father died and my brothers and sisters married and moved away, I was the one who nursed my mother through her final illness. I chose to; it wasn’t a case of the put-upon spinster daughter. And my mother was never one of those querulous old ladies. She was kind and cheerful, right to the end. But the sharing we did! The five years of meals shared, house shared, news shared, plans and worries and money problems, even the plots of books shared. I knew everything about her, because I had to: the state of her bowels and the foods that disagreed with her and the thoughts that kept her awake nights. And she knew about me because there was no escaping me; I was perpetually with her. Toward the end I even slept on a cot in her bedroom. When she died I was awakened merely by the silence — the stopping of a breath that I had lived with continually for five long years. Solitude shocked my eyes open. I was alone. I went through her funeral fully composed, and the only thing that disturbed me was the noise of all those brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews that had gathered for the occasion. “Oh, Mildred,” they said, “we know how you feel: you can’t believe it yet.” That was how they explained my not crying. Then Carrie, the sister closest to me, said, “I guess it must be almost a relief to you, her going. None of us would be shocked to hear it.” But it wasn’t the kind of relief she meant. I wasn’t relieved to be free, or to be rid of the work; I was relieved to have my privacy. If you were to shake me awake in the middle of the night and say, “Quick, without thinking: What is the most important thing in the world?” I would say, “Privacy.” I know that’s not right; you don’t have to tell me. I know that the true answer is probably love, or understanding, or feeling needed — even for me. But I am telling you what comes to mind first, and that’s privacy. Sitting alone in a room reading a book, with no one to interrupt me. That is all I ever consciously wanted out of life.

When I first came here, immediately after Mother died, I announced my requirements from the doorstep. “I see you let rooms,” I said. “I’d like one that’s cheap and quiet. No noise, no people in large numbers. Can you provide that?” At the time, I had no way of knowing that everything I said was unnecessary. Jeremy Pauling and his mother were more private than I had ever thought it possible to be. That front door might as well have had a curtain of cobwebs across it, like the Sleeping Beauty’s palace gate, with the two of them inside trying to make as little noise as possible and the rest of the world outside — some large cold frightening force waiting to pounce, something certain to win, superior to them in every way. Mrs. Pauling, going to the grocery store, wore several layers of clothing no matter how hot the weather was, as if she wished for armor. She stopped outside the house and looked all around her with a timid blue startled gaze, checking on what the enemy had in mind for her. She returned pushing a wire tote cart so packed with non-perishables that it seemed she was expecting a siege, and she would scurry inside with them and line them up in rows in her cupboards and then stand back to stare at them a long time, moving her lips as if counting. After one of those trips she might not go to the store again for weeks — or anywhere else, except church occasionally. She and Jeremy stayed inside and drank hot cocoa. Was there any other door in the world so suitable for me to knock upon? Originally I was going to live here only a few months, until I found a job and had saved the money for an apartment. Then I could be truly alone. But the years passed and I just never got around to it, and now I suppose that I never will. I like it here. If you want my opinion, our whole society would be better off living in boarding houses. I mean even families, even married couples. Everyone should have his single room with a door that locks, and then a larger room downstairs where people can mingle or not as they please. For I do like some people. I’m no hermit. I like to watch Jeremy’s and Mary’s children growing up, and the medical students turning into doctors, and Mr. Somerset shuffling through his pension. For such a good life, isn’t it fair that I should have to pay some price? The price is silence. Keeping silent when I am moved to speak, staying out of other people’s affairs, holding back my advice, giving them the privacy I have asked for myself. Often I wonder if I am making a mistake. I think: Am I missing something? Have I forfeited too much? Is there a time when people I love might not want to be left alone? But I resist; I climb the stairs to my room. I turn the key in the lock. One sad thing about this world is that the acts that take the most out of you are usually the ones that other people will never know about.

Mary stayed in the hospital five days, and believe me those were five mighty long days. At home the disorder grew worse, and the children got cranky and the house didn’t feel right any more. Daytimes Jeremy pottered around looking helpless; nights he worked in his studio till nearly dawn, and came to breakfast so tired and pale he could hardly speak. He never did go to the hospital. I went. I went every afternoon and every evening and watched Mary cry. Oh, I don’t mean that’s all she did. She had her cheerful moments, particularly when she’d just been with the baby. She made friends with the mothers in her ward, she received other visitors (Buddy, Buddy’s girlfriend, a few of the women in the park once word seeped out), and she wrote little notes for me to take home to the children. But at least once on every visit she would break down and cry. “Oh, why can’t I just go home to him?” she said once, and then, “Do you think I shouldn’t have had this baby?” One evening she was telling me why she’d wanted such a big family. “I was an only child,” she said (the first mention she had ever made to me of any kind of past), “and I always promised myself I would have at least a dozen children when I grew up. Well, I’m keeping my promise, aren’t I?” Then her eyes glazed over with tears. I wasn’t at all prepared, right then. “But sometimes,” she said, “I feel that every new baby is another rope, tying me down like a tent. I don’t have the option to leave any more. I’m forced to depend on him. He’s not dependable.”

“Hush, now, my goodness,” I said.

“I love him more than I ever loved anyone, do you believe me? But sometimes I start falling in love with my doctor or even the children’s doctor, they’re both so sure of what they’re doing. Even the furnace man, who knows exactly where the leak is, or the man who delivers my groceries. He whistles cheerful songs and slams that big box of groceries on my kitchen table.”

“You’re just upset,” I said.

I went home upset myself, and lay awake hoping that she would forget she had ever told me such things.

In the beginning, when they were first married, she asked so much of him. It was plain that she didn’t realize he was different from anybody else. “Come with me to pick out curtains,” I heard her say once. And another time, “Why don’t we ever go to movies, Jeremy?” Of course none of us had discussed the subject with her. Julia Jarrett always believed that for Mary’s sake he would change, and you might say that in a sense he did. He does go out more now. Why, presumably he had to go off this block for his wedding, and then there were those trips to the hospital and three years ago he went to Darcy’s school to see her play a flower in Red Riding Hood’s forest. (She gave Red Riding Hood a warning in a silvery little voice — I was there. “Be careful, little girl, remember what your mother told you.” Jeremy walked seven blocks to hear that and applauded all alone the minute she said her line, which naturally made Darcy furious. But I admired him for that. There are other kinds of heroes than the ones who swim through burning oil.) But no, he has never gone to Hecht’s to pick out curtains. He has never taken Mary to a movie. How does she explain that to herself? When did she put two and two together and realize that he never would? I really have no idea. All I can say is that bit by bit, it seemed she stopped asking him. It seemed she grew quieter, older, stronger. There was something more loving in the way she treated him. Then I heard her talking with Buddy, back before he knew us well. He was telling her about a play that she and Jeremy shouldn’t miss. “Oh,” she said, “Jeremy has nearly stopped going to plays. His eyes have been bothering him.” And I knew the pieces had finally fallen into place for her, she had stopped expecting him to be like other people. Still I worried. I realized, of course, that it was none of my business. Yet I was so anxious for Jeremy, so quick to imagine him in all possible scenes of failure with her. During the first few weeks of their marriage I sent her silent, invisible messages: If you are unkind it will be a sin, the worst you’ve ever committed. Don’t forget that this is a very special man you are dealing with. A genius. Not some run-of-the-mill insurance salesman. It wasn’t that I disliked her, you see; I was fond of her even that far back. But in some ways Mary is an everyday kind of woman, and this marriage was as odd for her, as distant from her main road, as it was for Jeremy. Look at the telephone pad in the hall! Her doodles are minute line drawings of steam irons and tricycles and Mixmasters. She adds to their incomes by sending household hints to ladies’ magazines. Is it any wonder I worried? All for nothing, as it turned out. She remained her serene and contented self, while Jeremy seemed ready to burst out of his skin with pride and happiness. I remember one morning she wore a new dress to breakfast, practically the only one I have ever seen her in. She looked just beautiful. I said, “My, that’s attractive. Isn’t it, Jeremy?” But Jeremy was in that mood he gets when he is about to start a new piece — a thousand miles away. He gave her a wide, blank smile and said nothing. I said, “Jeremy? Doesn’t Mary look pretty?” Because now it seemed he had to answer, for Mary’s sake. Jeremy said, “What?” He stood up and left. Now, a thing like that can seem important to some women. But when I looked over at Mary I saw that she was laughing, and she said, “Don’t worry, he loves it. I know because last week he cut a patch from inside the hem and used it for one of his pieces. He thought I wouldn’t notice.”

I was so relieved when I heard that. I thought, “Well, at least she understands him.” I never dreamed she would grow to be too understanding.

On Thursday evening Brian came by for Jeremy’s new batch of work. Brian’s visits are quite an event in this household. He himself is so impressive, in the first place — a handsome kind-faced man with a square-cut beard — and then too it is always the first glimpse we have of what Jeremy has been up to lately. The things they brought down that night were the best I’d yet seen. It’s strange how over the years Jeremy’s pieces have grown up. I mean physically, literally. They have doubled in size, and they are so deeply textured that they are almost sculptures. Ordinary objects are crowded into them — Dixie cups and bus tickets and his children’s plaid shoelaces, still recognizable — and his subjects are ordinary too, the smallest and most unnoticed scenes on earth. I found a man with a rake, a woman ironing a shirt, a child strapping on a roller skate. Their features were gone and they were bare of detail; they were layered over with the Dixie cups and the bus tickets. They made me sad.

Have you ever seen a television show that ends with stills from the scenes you have just finished watching? Music plays and the titles roll over them. The effect is of distance. Moments that you just witnessed are suspended forever while you yourself recede from them with every breath you take. The moments grow smaller, and yet clearer. You see some sorrow in them you had never before suspected. Now, does it make any sense when I say that Jeremy’s pieces affect me in the same way? This man with the rake, slightly stooped and motionless, reminded me that life is nothing but motion and passes too swiftly for us to observe with the naked eye. At least, for me to observe. Jeremy has no trouble whatsoever. He sees from a distance at all times, without trying, even trying not to. It is his condition. He lives at a distance. He makes pictures the way other men make maps — setting down the few fixed points that he knows, hoping they will guide him as he goes floating through this unfamiliar planet. He keeps his eyes on the horizon while his hands work blind. Am I the only one who sees this? Surely Brian never has. Brian merely tapped the pictures with his knuckles and nodded, chewing his pipe. “Good work, good work,” he said. Then he went on to talk about a boat he had bought. “In the spring I’m going to try a real trip on her,” he said. “I’m going to do it old style. I’ll eat what I catch, I’ll sail by celestial navigation.” Jeremy listened with his eyes wide, his expression awed and admiring. He stood beside his very best piece and forgot it utterly. Oh, Jeremy, I wanted to tell him, you too sail by celestial navigation and it is far more celestial than Brian’s.

But, of course, I didn’t say it out loud.

On Friday I went to visit Mary and she said they were letting her come home Saturday. She didn’t seem as happy as you’d expect. “Why, that’s wonderful!” I said. “I have Saturday off this week. I’ll drive everybody over at ten o’clock or so, shall I?”

“Oh well,” Mary said, “this time I think you might just come by yourself if you don’t mind.”

“What, alone?”

“It’s simpler that way.”

“Who asked it to be simple?” I said.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t have spoken out like that, but I could tell this new arrangement wasn’t really what she wanted. She was twining a wisp of hair very slowly around her fingers and not meeting my eyes when she spoke. She looked limp and uncombed. “Look,” I told her. “There’s no law that says you can’t change your mind. Call him up. Tell him you want him to come for you after all.”

“I never told him I didn’t want him to come,” she said.

“Then what’s all this about?”

“I’ve been waiting for him to offer, but he hasn’t.”

“You know it would be hard for him to offer.”

“I mean that he won’t even speak to me on the phone.”

“He won’t?” I said. I hadn’t realized that.

“When I telephone, one of the children always answers, and if I ask to speak to him they go off to call him and come back and say he’s in the middle of changing Hannah or frying eggs or something. He’s angry.”

Jeremy angry?

“No, he’s hurt, Mary,” I said.

“Well, I’m hurt too. I’ve been waiting all this time, thinking surely he would give in and call me. I lie here just for hours. Don’t you think I would say yes like a shot if he called and asked to visit me and take me home?”

“Of course. Yes, I know. But you could call, Mary.”

“I spend my life calling!” Mary said. She sat up in bed, and a few of the other women in the ward turned to stare. “It’s always me,” she said more quietly. “Never him. I make the first move every time. I’m tired.”

“Yes, now, I know,” I said, trying to hush her. And after that she did grow more reasonable. For the rest of the hour we talked about ordinary things. But when finally I rose to go, when I turned in the doorway to say goodbye, the last thing I saw was Mary sitting with her hands folded and her eyes lowered and her face sad and wistful. She reminded me of a girl waiting for an invitation to dance. Even her lace-trimmed nightgown had a pathetic look, like a ball dress carefully ironed by some loving mother who had imagined her daughter waltzing all evening, and never dreamed it could be otherwise.

For bringing home a new baby there is a ritual in this house, and I am part of it. I go along in the taxi, to stay with the children while Jeremy is inside the hospital. We are all packed into the back seat, and up front the driver is grumbling over the noise and the crowding and the cracker crumbs. While we wait I take the children to a concrete space beneath Mary’s window. I point it out to them. “See? There it is — the one with the shade pulled all the way up.” “Where? Where?” When all the children have located it, they start shouting. “Mama!” they call — even the littlest one. It is against our rules for Mary to be watching for us. She must stay out of sight, and wait to hear their voices. Then she comes to the window. Dressed, finally, all set to go. First she waves and blows kisses, then she play-acts her impatience to come down. She pounds silently on the windowpane, she sets her fist against her forehead. The children laugh, too shrilly. They sound a little hysterical. It occurs to me that for the smallest ones, this may be exactly how they have imagined her absence: they suspect she is being kept prisoner somewhere, forced to leave them in the fumbling care of their father. For she would never desert them of her own free will, would she? Then another face appears beside hers — Jeremy’s, round and blurred. Mary flings up her hands in joy, showing that the rescue squad has at last arrived. She turns and throws her arms around his neck. The two of them are framed in the window like heroes at the end of a romantic movie — wrapped together, touched with sunlight. We go back to the taxi. This will be our longest wait, while they collect the new baby and settle the bill. To pass the time we play “I Spy,” and we become so absorbed that Darcy is the only one to see her parents emerging. “Ta-taaa!” she says, like a trumpet. We look up to find them coming across the driveway, flushed and smiling. Mary carries the overnight case. She has read somewhere that if it is the father who introduces the new baby there will be less jealousy, and although I can’t see what earthly difference it makes she has given the baby to Jeremy. He holds it stiff-armed, at a distance, with his entire self concentrating on getting his prize safely to the car. He reminds me of little Pippi carrying a very full glass of water. “Here we are!” Mary says. Then the taxi is a flurry of hugs and kisses, and the baby is passed from one grimy set of hands to another. Even the taxi driver must have a turn; no one will be satisfied until he does. “Well now,” he says. “Yes sir. What do you know.” He gives it back, grins and shakes his head, and starts the motor. The ceremony is over. All requirements have been met. The rules are stashed in the back of our minds until two years from now.

I thought we would be collecting new babies that way forever. I didn’t realize the ritual could be abandoned so easily.

• • •

Early Saturday I went to the dimestore and chose a small toy for Mary to bring each of the children. Usually she tells me exactly what they have been wanting, but this time she didn’t seem to know. “Oh, anything,” she said. “You probably have better ideas than I do.” I entered the dimestore feeling uncertain — I had no ideas at all — but then I began to enjoy myself. I had been watching those children more closely than I suspected. I knew that Darcy would like something she could do with her hands — an embroidery set — and that Abbie had a yen for costume jewelry. The jewelry on the toy counter was not very satisfying. All I saw were pop-it beads and plastic bangles. But then in the grownups’ section I found a wealth of glittery rhinestones and great multicolored teardrop earrings. They were more expensive, but I could always chip in a little money of my own. I felt as proud of myself as if I had discovered them in a pirates’ chest. Who else would think of looking here for a child’s gift? I chose green glass earrings shaped like peacock tails and purple ones like huge bunches of grapes. I held one of each to my ears and looked in the mirror that sat on the countertop. Then I froze, with jewels dangling ridiculously below my great long earlobes.

For there I was, against a background of crepe-paper turkeys and pilgrim-shaped candles and sheaves of plastic Indian corn: my bony face all lit up and feverish and my pupils enormous and my fingers a little shaky, clutching those earrings. Like some tacky trite cartoon: old maid preparing for the arrival of the troops, or waiting for the meter man. Only it wasn’t any soldier or meter man that had lit my eyes so; it was the prospect of what I was going to do today. Choose the children’s surprises on my own, check Mary out of the hospital, carry that new baby home the way Jeremy used to do. Why, I could see myself carrying him! It was as if, without realizing it, I had spent all of the night before imagining every detail! I saw myself climbing the front steps holding the baby exactly right (much better than Jeremy would have, much more securely). I saw the children crowding around me, all anxious to share my treasure. I saw myself dispensing gifts. “Open that bag, will you, Darcy? See what you find. There are surprises there for all of you, I chose them myself.” They would scatter brown paper bags and cash register slips, all excited over gifts I had selected that Mary would never have thought of. Mary faded. Jeremy faded. I was left alone with that baby wrapped in powder blue and that circle of little faces.

I picked three toys in haste and went directly home. In the front hall I found Pippi, wearing frayed underpants and nothing else. She was shivering. Tears had made little gray streamers down her cheeks. “Miss Vinton, Abbie hit me” she said. I gave her a pat on the head and walked on by. I went straight to the kitchen, where I found Jeremy trying to get Hannah to eat her egg. That was what he had been doing when I left, an hour ago. Hannah was in her high chair with her lips clamped together, and Jeremy was saying, “Please, Hannah. Won’t you consider taking another bite?”

“Jeremy, here are some things I’d like you to give Mary,” I told him. I set my shopping bag on a chair. Jeremy looked up quickly. “Me?” he said.

“I won’t be going to the hospital, but I’ll be happy to stay with the children.”

Jeremy set the spoonful of egg down and opened the bag, as if he expected to find some answer inside it. “E-Z-Do Embroidery Set,” he said.

“Hush, it’s supposed to be a surprise.”

“I don’t quite see,” he told me. “Have I — is there something the matter, Miss Vinton?”

“Nothing’s the matter.”

“I had thought perhaps Mary wanted you to bring her home.”

“No, I think she would prefer you to do it.”

He started smiling. He nodded several times and his face grew pink. “Oh, well, then, certainly,” he said. “Thank you, Miss Vinton! I certainly do—”

“Any time,” I said. “Here, give me that,” and I reached for Hannah’s bowl of egg. “Now you’d better hurry. She was due to be released at ten and it’s already five of.”

“Oh yes,” Jeremy said. He rose and held out his hand. For a moment I couldn’t think why, but then I saw that he was beaming at me and I set the bowl on the table and shook his hand. “It’s certainly — it’s just wonderful of you to watch the children this way,” he said. “I really don’t know how to—”

“Oh shoot. Run along, now.”

He picked up the bag of gifts, which I had forgotten all about, and left the kitchen. I heard him in the hallway, scattering hangers and stumbling over rubber boots in the coat closet. A minute later I heard the front door slam. “Where’s he going?” Darcy said, coming into the kitchen. “I thought you were off getting Mom.”

“Jeremy’s doing that,” I told her.

“He is? Then can’t we all go too?”

“Not this time.”

“But Miss Vinton! We always used to!”

“That’s no reason to keep on doing a thing, is it?” I said.

I lifted Hannah out of her high chair and then I went into the parlor, to the front bay window. The lace curtains hid me. I watched Jeremy for as long as he stood waiting there — a radiant, dumpy man holding a paper bag. He leaned forward from time to time and looked for a taxi, first in one direction and then the other (although we live on a one-way street). He kept shifting the bag higher on his stomach. He wore no coat or jacket, nothing but his gray tweed golf cap and that sleazy sweater he had been in all week, but I held back from rushing out to him with an armload of wraps.

Then a taxi stopped for him, but instead of getting in immediately, Jeremy turned and looked back at the house. His face was so open, so happy and hopeful. I saw him take in a breath, maybe planning to call out something. Yet I know that he couldn’t see me. I stayed far back in the room. Finally he climbed into the taxi, and I sat down on the windowseat and reached for Pippi. “You think she hit just a little,” Pippi said. “But she hit me hard, smack in the stomach. She really hurt.” “I know, I know,” I said, barely listening. I put her on my lap and set my face against her head. Her hair had a clean sharp smell. I took a breath of it and felt it fill me like an ache, and I closed my eyes and held on to her for as long as she would allow.

Darcy made a poster: WELCOME EDWARD. We Scotch-taped it to the window. The four girls sat beneath it, freshly dressed and combed, making four steamy o’s on the glass. Then Abbie said, “Here they are! Here they come!” The taxi pulled up, the door opened, out stepped Mary. After her came Jeremy, with the baby in his arms. “See, how little?” I said, but I was talking to an empty room. The children were already fighting their way to the door. “I open it, because I’m the oldest,” Darcy said, but Abbie said, “You always get to do things!” “Hush!” I called. They paid me no attention. I stood alone at the window and smiled down at Jeremy and Mary, who came up the walk side by side, laughing, surrounded by a sea of bobbing heads and small hands waving in celebration.