Celestial Navigation

9. Fall, 1971: Jeremy

First he tried making a woman seated at a sewing machine, but the curve of her back kept coming out wrong and after a while he gave up. Then a child with a cat, but he lost interest halfway through. Then a girl braiding her hair, which he finished because he made himself, but he knew it wasn’t right. Lines came out knotty, angles awkward, flat planes lumpy and uneven. He kept ripping things out and then neglecting to replace them, sitting instead on a stool beside the piece while his hands went on working at useless tasks, at picking a cuticle or creasing the material of his trousers. Why couldn’t I have been a musician, he wondered, and played what other people have already written down? Why not a writer, just giving new twists to words I already know? Yet Miss Vinton, bringing him cocoa, smiled at the statue of the girl and said, “Why, it’s Darcy!” He was only modeling the people he had seen in real life, wasn’t he? No. There was no way to sum people up; he was making new ones. An imaginary family. He stroked the imaginary Darcy’s hand with a touch like a feather. Then he shook his head. “Sorry,” Miss Vinton said. “I thought — here, I brought some cocoa. I won’t keep you from your work.” She went out on tiptoe, protecting his concentration. All she saw of him was the seamless exterior — Sculptor at Work. She never guessed at the cracks inside, the stray thoughts, tangents of memory, hours of idleness, days spent leafing through old magazines or practicing square knots on a length of red twine or humming under his breath while he tapped his fingers on the windowsill and stared down at the people in the street. A morning of half sleep on the couch in the corner, five minutes changing the slant of the statue’s eyes, an afternoon playing with a tube of Christmas glitter powder.

He had heard that suffering made great art, but in his case all it made was parched, measly, stunted lumps far below his usual standard.

In his sleep he worked so hard that sheer exhaustion woke him up. He dreamed of cutting scraps of moonlight, strips of rain-spangled air, long threads of wind. Arranging them took such effort that he could feel his brain knotting. It seemed that he was aiming for some single solution, as in a mathematical problem. “Is this it? Is this it?” No answer. No click in his head to tell him he was finally right. He awoke feeling strained and damp, hoping that morning had arrived, but it hadn’t. He always found himself in an opaque darkness, behind drawn shades and closed curtains, swaddled in grayish bedclothes. His life, he thought, was eye-shaped — the tight pinched corners of childhood widening in middle age to encompass Mary and the children, narrowing back now to this single lonely room. The silence hummed, and sometimes voices leaped out of it and startled him. He knew they were not real. They were accidental, something like the cells formed by molecules colliding and combining. He heard his sister Laura praising a friend’s needlework, Pippi talking to a lady-bug, a long-forgotten medical student requesting a new study lamp — all those separate eras weaving themselves together in his head. Mary asked if he needed new pajamas. Had her voice really been that young, once upon a time? Why, when they first met she must have been barely twenty-two. He had never thought much about that before. To him she had always been calm and stately, ageless, classical. Only now he remembered her flashing laughter and the pounding of her feet up the stairs and the whimsical, pigtailed paper dolls she used to make for Darcy. Her easy tears, her tempers with the children and the sudden way those tempers would disappear in swift, impulsive hugs that reminded him of reunions after journeys. How had he managed to overlook all that? He had loved her for the wrong qualities, the ones that were least important or that perhaps she did not even possess. He had ignored the ones that mattered. “How’s your supply of socks?” she asked him. Behind her words he heard sparks and ripples, maybe even laughter, maybe directed at the absurdity of the subject they were discussing.

In the dark his mother’s voice was thinner than a thread, weaving its way through a tangle of other people’s words. “Oh, Jeremy, you were always so … I really and truly don’t …” She spoke with that whispery sigh that meant he had done something wrong — a sigh not of anger but of disappointment. Well, of course. Lying here on his back, watching his mistakes roll across the ceiling, he felt he had done everything wrong. “Why, Jeremy?” she used to say (when he spilled his milk, or wrinkled his clothes, or failed to make his bed). “Why are you treating me this way? I’ve been as good to you as I know how to be. Now I see that being good is not enough.” It occurred to him that she had spoken truer words than she knew. Being good was not enough. The mistakes he reviewed were not evil deeds but errors of aimlessness, passivity, an echoing internal silence. And when he rose in the morning (having waited out the night, watching each layer of darkness lift slowly and painfully), he was desperate with the need to repair all he had done, but the only repairs he could think of were also aimless, passive, silent. He had a vague longing to undertake some metaphysical task, to make some pilgrimage. In books a pilgrimage would pass through a fairytale landscape of round green hills and nameless rivers and pathless forests. He knew of no such landscape in America. Fellow pilgrims in leather and burlap would travel alongside him only long enough to tell their stories — clear narratives with beginnings, middles, ends and moral messages, uncluttered by detail — but where would he find anyone of that description? And think of what he would have to carry in the rustic knapsack on his back. The tools of his craft: Epoxy glue in two squeeze tubes, spray varnish, electric sander, disposable paintbrushes. Wasn’t there anything in the world that was large scale any more? Wasn’t there anything to lift him out of this stillness inside? He fumbled for his clothes and picked his way downstairs. He made his breakfast toast and ate it absently, chewing each mouthful twenty times and gazing at the toaster while he tried to find just one heroic undertaking that he could aim his life toward.

On a Saturday morning early in November he went into the older children’s room on the third floor. He braved the tumult that seemed to go on filling the air with noise and movement even this long afterward — circus paintings and laughing dolls and plastic horses and coffee cans overflowing with broken crayons — and he found Abbie’s pink nylon backpack at the bottom of the closet. In the kitchen he made two cheese sandwiches and a thermos of coffee, and he put them into the backpack along with an apple, a flashlight, and all the rent money from the cookie jar. He located a city bus map in the front of the telephone book, and after studying it for a moment he carefully tore out the entire page and folded it over and over and put it in his shirt pocket. Then he was ready to go.

Outdoors he was swept by a sudden coolness that he was not prepared for. He was wearing lightweight clothes, and a cotton windbreaker and his gray tweed golf cap. For warmth he kept his arms tightly folded and he walked with short, brisk steps, with the backpack whispering and bouncing behind him. He traveled several blocks, barely hestitating as he came to street crossings. Someone watching very carefully might have seen him swallow, or brace his shoulders, or look a few too many times to the left and right when a traffic light turned green, but otherwise he seemed no different from anyone else. At one corner he stopped and peered up at the street sign a moment, and then he made a turn and kept walking. He was among crowds now. Women sped past carrying dress boxes and string-handled paper bags, looking purposeful. A stroller with two children in it ran over his left foot. At the doorway of the dimestore, teenagers stood around shoving each other and popping their bubble gum and combing their hair and beginning dance steps they never finished. “Excuse me,” Jeremy kept saying. “Oh, I’m sorry. Excuse me, please.” They didn’t listen. He threaded his way among them, his arms down at his sides now, trying to avoid touching anyone.

The inside of the dimestore smelled of wooden floors and popcorn. It seemed to him that there were far too many people in the aisles. “Excuse me,” he kept saying, but as if he were transparent, no one noticed. He had to make his way to the toy department inch by inch, indirectly. When he finally reached it, he found a girl in a wrinkled smock filing her fingernails behind the counter. “Excuse me, I am going to need six toys,” he told her. She looked up, still filing away. “I need toys to take to my children.”

“Fine with me,” she said.

“Do you have six toys I could take to them?”

She waved the nail file toward the toys, which spilled down not one counter but several and were made up of far too many colors. His eyes began blurring. “Well, I — do you possibly have any suggestions?” he asked her.

“Just look around, is what I suggest.”

Rubber, paper, painted tin, plastic in phosphorescent shades of pink and chartreuse. Everything he saw seemed to make him hungry. He felt hollow and weak. “Perhaps—”he said. His hand hovered over a tiny wind-up metal tricycle, ridden by a metal boy, but when he looked up at the salesgirl she only filed a thumbnail and stared past him, refusing even a hint of encouragement. He sighed and moved on. He traveled down the rows of toys and then beyond them, up other aisles, pausing at a rack of coloring books and then again at infants’ wear but still not buying anything. A terrycloth bib bore a painted picture of a baby who reminded him of Rachel, but the words beneath it said “I’m Daddy’s Little Angel” and none of his children had ever called him Daddy. He wondered why not. He wondered if it were too late now for them to begin. But still, he didn’t buy the bib. He imagined that Mary might give him an odd, considering look when she read the words on it, and the thought of that look made him feel foolish.

At the stationery counter he became fascinated by party favors. They hung on hooks, in little cellophane packets — clusters of tiny paper parasols that really opened, plastic cradles no bigger than walnut shells, tin horns with tassels and decks of cards the size of his thumbnail. He hung over them open-mouthed, reverently touching first one packet and then another. “Help you?” a woman said, but he shook his head. He made himself leave the favors and think of children’s things again — masses of balloons in a plastic bag, striped paper hats, then stationery with pictures of little girls in the upper left-hand corner. Stationery? He wasn’t sure which of his children were literate. He returned to the party favors, and found beneath them a section containing small white spherical packages tied with blue ribbon. “Excuse me,” he said to the woman. “I was wondering what was in these.”

“These here? Surprises.”

“I mean — could you tell me what the surprises are?”

“Now, if I knew that,” she said, “they wouldn’t be surprises, would they?”

“No, I suppose not.”

They were sold in packs of three. He could buy two packs and they would come out even. Also he thought it would be exciting to have gifts that were so mysterious. Who knew what might be hidden inside? Perhaps occasionally they filled a package with a real treasure, something worth far more than the price. As soon as he thought of that, choosing became difficult. He didn’t want to make any mistakes. He picked up a pack and then dropped it, picked another, burrowed deep down to find the bottom-most one. From time to time he looked up at the woman and gave her a small friendly smile, but she never smiled back at him. Still, he felt he was making the right decision. When he had paid for them he took off his backpack to put the surprise balls inside, and the smooth way they fit between his cheese sandwiches gave him a feeling of competence. He had chosen well, unerringly, with all his instincts working for him. He was still smiling when he left the store.

Now he pulled the bus map from his pocket and checked it one last time, although he had already memorized where he should go. It was very important to find the corner where his particular bus stopped. If he forgot, or had misread something, he could be lost for days. He might never get home again. Perhaps he should not have attempted this. But the surprise balls rustled crisply in his pack, and the map pointed out his bus stop very clearly, and if he went home now he knew that he would despise himself forever, he would spend the rest of his life chewing the bitter knowledge that he hadn’t a single spark of courage in him. He set out toward the bus stop, walking more slowly now and holding the map in front of him, blindly folding and unfolding it.

At the corner he wanted he found four people already waiting, which was encouraging. They stood below a blue sign bearing the number of his bus. He checked the number against the map, thought for a moment, and then checked it again. Everything was in order. He smiled at the other people. They looked around him, through him, above him. There was a woman in elastic stockings, a teenaged boy, a soldier, and a younger boy with his hands in his pockets. For some reason their skin appeared to be all the same shade of rough, dry pink and their hair straggled down in identical brown wisps, although they stood separate from each other and were obviously not related. Jeremy felt chilled by them. He thought of his sculptures, in which people like these so often appeared — standard representatives of what Brian called simple humanity, but any time Jeremy went out he was forced to see that humanity was far more complex and untidy and depressing than it ever was in his pieces. The old ladies were rude and sniveling, the men lacked solidity somehow, and the children seemed to carry a threat of violence. Jeremy spent the rest of his wait standing sideways to them — not confronting them but not facing totally away, either, for fear of giving offense — and like them he kept his eyes fixed on an empty spot in the distance.

When finally the bus came, it seemed almost as familiar as home. He climbed into a smell he had remembered without realizing it from thirty years in the past, from the days when he rode to art school or went shopping for clothes with his mother. The air was warm and slightly stuffy. Although he had to ask the driver what the price of a ticket was nowadays, he noticed that the seats still braced his spine at the same unnatural angle, and the doors still pleated themselves open and shut, and the back of the driver’s neck still gave the impression of kindliness and reliability. Jeremy relaxed and looked out the window. He held Abbie’s pack on his lap now, so that he could sit more comfortably, and as he rode along he kept stroking the slippery pink nylon as he had once stroked the satin binding on his blanket, long ago in childhood, waiting to be borne off to sleep.

Two ladies behind him were discussing someone’s drinking problem. The soldier was whistling. A husband and wife were arguing over a woman named LaRue and up front a tiny black lady was talking to the bus driver. “You ought to seen him when they told him,” she said. “He jumped up and shouted, ‘Where’s my gun? Where’s my gun?’ Planning on shooting his self. Later he wanted to jump into the grave. They had to hold him back by the elbows.”

“Is that right,” the driver said. “Well, I expect he felt mighty close to her.” Jeremy nodded over and over, impressed by the strangeness of what he heard and by the driver’s easy acceptance of it.

Now the landscape outside his window was more open and barren, and the streets were less crowded. He was not sure that he had ever been here before. The scrubby trees far at the edge of the horizon had a desolate look, but in his present mood, when he was so proud of this trip and so hopeful at the thought of seeing Mary again, even desolation gave him the feeling of happiness swelling and unfolding inside him. He thought of things that had not occurred to him for years, some of them sad. He thought of his grandmother Amory, whom he had loved very much, and of the gilt-framed picture that hung in her parlor. A crowd of people in a faded forest. “See that forest?” his grandmother said. “Every bit of it is real. It is made of dried plants, the pines are dried ferns and the flowers are dried violets.” “How about the people?” Jeremy had asked, not thinking. “Are they dried too?” He thought of Mrs. Jarrett, his mother’s old boarder. Why, he had never properly mourned Mrs. Jarrett’s passing! Grief flashed through him like a sharp white light. How elegant she had been, with her plumed hats and her white gloves! How hard she must have worked to keep up her appearance! He looked around him at the inside of the bus, at the people nodding and agreeing with each other and the soldier whistling his tripping little tune. Then down at his hands, cupping Abbie’s pink backpack. Even his hands seemed dear and sad, and gave him cause for joy.

Now here was the narrow rutted road to the boatyard, pointed out to him so patiently by the driver. A line of cottages and trailers dotted the wild grass. Jeremy plodded along in the herringbone prints of some truck or tractor, keeping his head bent against a cold breeze that was blowing up. The soil was very soggy, as if it had rained not long ago, and soon his shoes and trouser cuffs were damp. He thought the dampness was pleasant — two cool hands pressing the soles of his feet. After rounding each curve he looked for a glimpse of the boatyard. He had no idea how far it was. But when he failed to find it he trudged on without minding. Some kind of rhythm had been set up, and his legs swung forward in a steady trundling gait that seemed to require no effort. He felt he could have gone on till nightfall and still not have tired.

Then up sprang a cluster of gray shacks and a sheet of water beyond them — silently, eerily. He almost thought he had caught them moving into place just out of the corner of his eye. Above the largest building, which was plastered with soft drink signs, a tin chimney seemed suspended from a thread of smoke. There were several shabby cars scattered about, and a rusty flatbed truck beside a shed, and boats lining the dock and moored out on the water, but he saw no sign of humans. He approached the largest building as slowly as possible. Still, he felt he brought more noise and motion than the rules of this place would allow.

“Al’s Supplies” the sign outside said, with Coca-Cola circles at either end like giant red thumbtacks. Jeremy climbed the hollow wooden steps and went inside. He found a man sitting beside a pot-bellied stove, reading a tabloid. All around him were display cases full of astonishing objects, things made of brass and wood and leather. Coils of very white rope hung from the rafters. In the dimness beyond he saw tinned goods on shelves, and he could smell cheese. “Excuse me,” he said. The man folded his paper very carefully and creased the fold with his thumbnail before he looked up. “I was wondering if you knew where Brian O’Donnell’s house is,” Jeremy said.

“O’Donnell. No such fellow here by that name.”

“But — but there has to be,” Jeremy said.

“Nope.”

“Isn’t this the Quamikut Boatyard?”

“Yes, but there ain’t no—”

“He has a house here. His name is O’Donnell, a man with a beard.”

“Well, I never seen him and I know everybody roundabout, Mister.”

“But surely you — and there’s a woman there now with six children, staying in his house.”

“Oh! You’re talking about Mary Pauling.”

“That’s right, that’s who I mean.”

“She’s here, but I never heard of no O’Donnell before.”

“Well, um, could you tell me how to find her?”

“Sure. You just go on a ways down that road you come in by. Pass the boatyard, you’ll find her place the very last thing. Her and the kids ought to be there right now, it’s Saturday.”

“I see,” said Jeremy. “Well, thank you.”

“You a friend of hers?”

“Friend?”

“I don’t want you going down there if you’re not welcome, now.”

“No, please, it will be all right,” Jeremy said.

He had to endure a long, silent inspection. The man tipped back in his chair and looked him up and down and chewed on his lower lip. Then he said, “Well, okay, get on.”

Jeremy hitched his backpack higher on his shoulders and walked out again. Some of his confidence had faded. Mary’s house was stamped with her name already, her schedule was familiar to people Jeremy had never laid eyes on, her safety was guarded by total strangers. And all in such a short time, a period he would have called sufficient for merely a visit. What was her secret?

He continued down the road past the shacks, alongside the water, across a gravel parking lot. What he was looking for was a vacation cottage, perhaps one of those shingled A-frame things that he had often seen advertised in the resort section of the Baltimore Sun. Instead he found a tipsy gray shanty with cinderblocks for a doorstep. Not here, surely. He moved around it, hoping for something more suitable just beyond. On the other side, standing on a wooden crate beneath a window, he found Mary. She was humming a cheerful, meandering tune and rolling up a sheet of newspaper. The wind whipped her skirt around her knees, and in spite of the cold she wore no sweater. While he watched she laid the tube of newspaper along the lower crevice of the windowframe, reached down to her feet for a wheel of masking tape, and taped the tube in place. Then she bent for another sheet of newspaper, which was anchored beneath her foot. As she straightened she caught sight of Jeremy. She stopped humming. He thought her face grew pale, but her voice was perfectly calm. “Hello, Jeremy,” she said.

“Hello.”

He shifted his weight to the other foot.

“Well!” she said finally. “Have you come for a visit?”

“Yes, I — no. I thought—”

His awkwardness made him feel overheated. From one pocket he pulled out a handkerchief to wipe his forehead, and while he was doing that she stepped down off the crate and came over to him. “Jeremy?” she said. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, certainly.”

“How’d you get here?”

“By bus, and then I walked,” he said.

“Walked! You poor soul!”

She laid a hand on his arm. “Really, it was nothing,” he told her. “I’m not at all tired.” Then he was sorry he said it, because she let go of him and moved away again. He felt he had lost some opportunity that he had noticed only too late. Where her hand had rested, his arm seemed to have become more sensitive. He concentrated on it, re-creating the pressure of her fingers, wishing that his arm possessed some sort of magnetic power. All he saw of her now was her back, the springy tendrils of hair escaping from her bun and her skirt whipping and flattening in the wind. “You’ll want to see the children I guess,” she called back.

“Why, yes, I—”

She led the way to the front of the house. He still couldn’t believe that she would live in such a place. The cinderblocks made a gritty sound beneath his feet, the doorknob was a globe of solid rust and a bald patch in the linoleum nearly tripped him as he entered. At first all he could see was layers of diapers hanging up and down the length of the room. “Sorry,” said Mary, “we’ve had a rainy spell lately, I had to hang them inside.” She went ahead of him, parting diapers. He felt like a blind man. It was impossible to tell what kind of room he was in. He smelled laundry detergent and cold, stale air. He heard the children’s voices but could see no sign of them. “Seven of hearts,” one said. “Eight.” “Nine, ten.” “Jack? Anyone got the pack?” “Children, Jeremy’s here,” Mary said. Then they broke the last diaper barrier and stood in a doorway, looking into a tiny bedroom. The four oldest girls were playing cards on a caved-in double bed. Edward sat beside them stirring up a deck of cards of his own, and over by the window stood Rachel — could that be Rachel? standing? — holding onto the sill and turning to smile up at him, wearing unfamiliar pink overalls and showing several teeth that he had never seen before. “Jeremy!” Darcy said. They piled off the bed and came to hug him. He felt a tangle of arms around his chest, another pair around his knees. Everywhere he reached out, he touched heads of hair so soft it seemed his fingers might have imagined them. “What are you doing here?” they asked him. “Did you come to stay?” “Did you miss us?” He was amazed that they were so glad to see him. After all, they might have forgotten him, or never even noticed his absence. “Well, now,” he kept saying. “Goodness. Well, now!”

“How come you’re wearing my backpack?” Abbie asked.

“Oh, I hope you don’t mind, I borrowed it to carry my supplies.”

“No, that’s okay.”

“Also some gifts, I believe,” he said. “Let me see, here.” He hunched his way out of the backpack and set it on the bed. From between his two sandwiches he pulled the surprise balls, and then took forever trying to break into the plastic wrappings. In the end he had to chew through them with his teeth in order to start a rip. He distributed the balls in a great hurry, one to each child, one even to Rachel. “Open them,” he said. “Go on. They’re surprises, no one knows what’s in them.” He was so anxious for the gifts to turn out all right that the children’s fumbling fingers strained his nerves. He reached into the backpack for one of the sandwiches, unwrapped it and took great tearing bites of it, chewing steadily as he watched the long ribbons of white crêpe paper unwinding onto the floor.

The first to find anything was Pippi. A little ping sounded at her feet. “Oh!” she said, and bent and picked up a flat tin whistle the size of a postage stamp. She turned it over several times. “It’s a whistle,” she said finally. She blew on it, but the sound that came out was whispery and toneless. She turned it over again. “Never mind,” said Jeremy, “go on unwrapping. I’m sure there’s more.” He took another bite of his sandwich. He looked over at Darcy, who had just found her surprise — another whistle. Everyone had whistles. Some had one, some two or three. The only difference between them was the colors. The gifts’ round shape was formed by a cardboard center, something like the core of a ball of string. The centers fell to the floor and rolled around with hollow sounds. Crêpe paper ribbons rose like mounds of spaghetti around everyone’s feet. One by one the children lifted the whistles to their lips, blew them, lowered them, and looked at Jeremy. They seemed not so much disappointed as puzzled. Their faces were courteous and watchful, as if they were waiting for some explanation. When Rachel cried out, holding up her own ball, which was still unopened but damp where she had chewed it, Mary said, “Here, Rachel, I’ll help,” and those faces swung toward Rachel all at the same second, as if they thought she might provide what they were waiting for. While Mary unwound the ball Rachel reached out with both hands, catching tails of crêpe paper. At the very end two whistles fell to the floor — one yellow, one blue. She crowed and stooped to pick them up, but Mary was too quick for her. “No, honey,” she said. “You might swallow them.” Over her shoulder she called, “Darcy, find her something. Hand her my keys, will you?” But the keys were no good. Rachel threw them away and started crying, still straining toward the whistles in her mother’s hand. “Rachel, they’ll hurt you,” Mary told her. Then she said to Jeremy, “I’ll just save them till later, shall I?”

“Oh. Surely,” he said.

“As soon as she’s old enough I’ll give them to her. I know she’ll love them.”

Never mind, the last thing I need is tact, he wanted to tell her. I know they don’t care for whistles. And I know it doesn’t matter all that much anyway; I’m not a child, after all. But there was no way to say it out loud without bringing on more tact — reassurance, protestations. “J think these gifts are lovely,” Mary said. “Aren’t they, children? Wasn’t it nice of Jeremy to bring them?”

Murmurs rose up too quickly, on cue. “Thank you, Jeremy.” “Golly, these sure are nice, Jeremy.”

“Oh, well,” he said.

“You know how fond children are of things that make noise,” Mary told him.

He looked at her helplessly, at her kind, protecting, understanding eyes, and for lack of words he finished the last of his sandwich with a single chomp and wiped the crumbs off on the front of his shirt. Chewing gave him a good reason not to speak. He gazed straight ahead of him, chewing hard, conscious of seven faces turned in his direction and frozen there.

“How is your work going?” Mary asked him.

He chewed on. He couldn’t seem to finish. The bread and cheese seemed to have molded together like soggy newspaper.

“Jeremy?” she said. “Aren’t you working any more?”

Her face was so concerned. She was being so careful of him. He swallowed hard and cleared his throat. “Of course I am,” he said.

“You are?”

“My work is going very well. Very well. I am very pleased with it.”

“Oh,” said Mary. “Well, that’s wonderful.”

“In fact, it’s going better than it ever has before,” he said.

“That’s nice.”

She turned and went out of the bedroom. Following her, he had to bat his way between the damp diapers. The children came behind him in a shuffling, whispering line. When he located Mary again — just easing herself onto a dingy mound of a sofa and arranging Rachel upon her lap — Jeremy sat down too, but at some distance from her. The children settled themselves on the floor, all facing their parents, completely silent now. He winced to see them on that cold, blackened linoleum. He noticed how shabby and unattractive they looked — ragged children with reddened noses and chapped hands and lips, their sleeves short enough to expose their wrists and their shoes muddy and curling at the toes. And the house filled him with despair. At each gust of wind outside the cold burst in upon him like little knives from several directions. The furniture seemed untrustworthy — infested or disease-ridden. He sat gingerly on the edge of the couch. He kept his eyes averted from the miserable attempt at a kitchen that he had glimpsed across the room. Why must she choose the very worst house to live in? Why had she gone husbandless to the hospital that time, no doubt calling down all the nurses’ pity and indignation? Was it purposeful? Was it aimed at him? Yet the next thing she said was, “We’re doing very well, too.”

He stared at her.

“We’re doing beautifully,” she told him.

Yes. She would do beautifully anywhere. There was no defeating her. He felt tired at the thought of her.

“I have a job now, you know,” she said. “I work at a day nursery in one of those cottages up the road. You probably passed it.”

“Do — but what about the children?” he said.

“Well, the younger ones I take with me. The others go to school.”

“School? Is there a school out here?”

“There are schools everywhere, Jeremy. They can walk out to the highway and catch a bus that takes them right to the door.”

He imagined them in a huddle at the bus stop, shivering in their thin, patched dresses, their bare legs blotchy with cold. “Mary, I don’t think — it sounds so—”

“The day nursery lets out the same time school does. I’m home before they are. And I like my work.”

Yes, but what about me? he asked silently. Are you saying you won’t consider returning? Have I come all this way for nothing?

“You know, Jeremy,” Mary said, “I’m managing on my own now. I’m not depending on a soul. I’m doing it on my own.”

Well, of course she was. Mary had always managed on her own. Why did she even bother mentioning it? The answer was simple: she was telling him she had no place for him. He turned to meet her eyes and found her glowing and confident, as beautiful as ever, more beautiful. “I’ve even started paying Brian rent money,” she said. “I don’t want to be beholden to him.”

“Mary, haven’t you used any of the money in the bank?”

“That’s your money, Jeremy. I’m trying to manage on my own.”

“But the children! I mean—”

“How are things at home? Is Miss Vinton helping you out?”

“Oh, Miss Vinton, yes.”

“How’s Olivia?”

“Why, she left,” he said. “She didn’t even tell us goodbye.”

“Left? Where’d she go to?”

“I’m not at all sure. And toward the end she didn’t seem to be herself, I do hope—”

“Oh dear, I’ve thought of her often,” Mary said. “I should have taken her with me.”

“Where, here?”

“Certainly here.”

“I don’t understand how you have room for the number you do have,” he said, looking around.

“Really, we’re very comfortable. Also I’m planning to buy an oil stove,” she told him. “That will help when it gets colder. And Darcy and I are winterizing the place ourselves, did you notice?”

“Um—”

“Sealing off the windows and everything.”

He thought of the rolled-up newspapers. “Ah, yes,” he said. “No, I know what winterizing is, I just thought—”

“We’re doing a pretty good job, don’t you think?”

“Yes.”

“Most people would have to ask some man to do that.”

“Oh. Well, I think I had better take care of it now,” he said.

“You?”

“I’ll go tend to it right away.”

“But Jeremy,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like to—”

“Do you think I don’t know how?”

“No, of course not. I don’t think that for a minute. I’m sure you know how.”

“Well, then,” he said. “I expect I’d better get started.”

“Do you mean right this minute?”

“Why, yes.”

“Wouldn’t you like to sit here a while? I could give you a bite to eat.”

“I’ve already eaten.”

“You could sit and talk, maybe. Don’t you want to?”

If they talked, she would say what he dreaded to hear, and once said it could never be taken back. He rose hastily, draping his bald spot with the sudden coolness of a diaper. It was important to take action at once. To surround her with efficiency and authority. “I’ll do it all, you see to the children,” he told her. And he had clapped his cap on and was out the door before she had time to rise to her feet.

He had to do a better job of it than she and Darcy could. That was essential. Instead of folding tubes one by one as he needed them he did them all at once, and weighted them with a stone. He cut off lengths of masking tape and fastened them by their tip ends to the sills of the various windows. Only then did he climb up on the crate and begin the actual task. It seemed that his fingers could not make a wrong move today. Everything proceeded so smoothly, in such a well-ordered fashion. Why, there was nothing to this sort of work! He could have been taking care of it all these years. The wood was rotten and it crumbled beneath the tape but he managed anyway, locating the most solid places, feeling a sense of patience and tolerance for this pitiful world that Mary thought so much of. He could win her back in no time, it wasn’t impossible. Wasn’t he managing this windowsill well? Wasn’t he finally in control?

Mary came out of the house carrying a mug of coffee, balancing Rachel on her left hip in a familiar way that hurt him to see. She still had not put on a sweater, and the baby’s feet were bare. “She’ll get sick, Mary,” he told her.

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s much too cold out here.”

“Cold?”

She looked up at him, at where he stood teetering on the crate. “Jeremy, it’s not cold,” she said. “This is the warmest fall in anyone’s memory. It’s November and people still have their boats out.”

“But the wind,” he said.

She turned and looked out toward the water, as if the wind would be visible there. She looked at him again. “But it’s not a cold wind, Jeremy,” she said. “It’s just a cool breeze. Are you cold?”

“No, no.” He felt beaten. He was sorry he had mentioned it. Mary smiled up at him with her face bright and suntanned and her eyes very certain, her bare arms showing not a single goose bump. When she handed him the mug of coffee she touched his hand with hers, and even her fingertips were warm. She let her hand rest there as if proving the warmth, gloating over it, but Jeremy slipped out of her reach immediately and then she went away.

As soon as the windows were done he went back in the house. He carried his stack of newspapers and roll of tape. “Oh, good, you’re finished,” Mary said. “Won’t you sit down with me and have some more coffee? Children, will you get out from underfoot, please?” But Jeremy said, “No, no, I want to do this properly. I’ll have to seal the insides, too.”

“You mean, right now?”

“I want to get this done the way it ought to be,” Jeremy told her.

“I see,” said Mary. “Well, goodness. You certainly are fixing it so we could stay all winter here.”

“I can manage everything. I don’t want you to have to bother yourself at all.”

“I see,” Mary said again, and then she sat down in a kitchen chair and let him get on with his work.

• • •

“What next?” he said when he was done. Mary was in the kitchen, slicing carrots. There were so many children around her that he had to shout to make himself heard, but as soon as he had spoken they fell silent. He had never known such a silence. He couldn’t understand what they were waiting for. Mary turned and looked at him, but her face was blank and he wondered if he should repeat the question. “What next?” he said. “What else needs doing?”

“Why, nothing I can think of, thank you.”

“Nothing? There must be something.”

“No.”

“You said you were doing things to winterize.”

She turned very suddenly back to the cutting board. She began slicing the carrots with a clipped, definite motion.

In the silence one of the children said, “We were going to air the sails, remember?”

“We can do that later,” Mary said without looking around.

“Do what?” said Jeremy.

“Air the sails,” Abbie told him.

“I don’t understand.”

“We do it for Mr. O’Donnell. After a rainy spell we go out and run up his sails to dry them. Mom hates doing it.”

He looked at Mary. Still only at her back.

“Oh,” he said finally. “Well, then. It seems that’s something I’d better take care of.”

Then she did turn. She said, “Never mind that, Jeremy, I can see to it later.”

“But I — Abbie says you hate it.”

“Jeremy, please. Can’t you stop doing things a minute?”

“I’m not at all overtired,” he said.

“No, I know you’re not.”

“Then what are we waiting for?”

He was out the door and six feet away before he realized that he didn’t know which boat was Brian’s. When he turned, he found a whole cluster of children watching him from the steps. They advanced on him, all talking at once. “It’s the blue one, the ketch.” “There it is.” “You have to row out in a dinghy.”

“A dinghy. Oh,” he said.

“There’s the dinghy.”

He followed Hannah’s pointing finger and found a dinghy nearly hidden in a clump of weeds down by the water. An enormous thing. He cleared his throat. “Ah, yes,” he said.

“You run the sails up the masts and let them dry a little while.”

“Yes, I see.”

“Can we come too?”

“Come — surely your mother must need you at home,” he said.

“No, she doesn’t.”

The thought of the children alongside him, rocking the boat and swarming everywhere, falling overboard and requiring him to jump in after them when he couldn’t swim, was even more terrifying than the thought of rowing alone. “Perhaps another time,” he said.

“Why can’t we? Mom always lets us.”

“She does?”

“She takes the bunch of us and the baby too.”

“I see. Well, then,” said Jeremy, “I suppose you may come.”

The children cheered. Jeremy walked toward the water with very small, firm steps, fixing his eyes upon the dinghy and praying for it to turn out to be more manageable than it looked from here. It wasn’t. It seemed gigantic. Its peeling, weathered surface had the same depressing effect on him as gray-painted machinery or factory buildings. There was a pool of scummy water in the bottom. Wasn’t that a danger sign? The oars looked too long to handle. Even the rope that tied it presented a problem; it was fastened to a post with a clever, casual-looking knot. “Here,” said Darcy, when he had taken too long loosening it. “Let me.” She slipped it off easily and handed it to him. While he waited, numbly keeping hold of it, she helped the children pile in. “Not Pippi, Pippi went first last time. It’s Eddie’s turn. Who’s going to sit next to Jeremy?”

“Wait!” they heard. Jeremy turned and saw Mary flying down the slope toward them with the baby bouncing on her hip and her face pale and her eyes dark and wide, almost without whites to them. He thought something terrible must have happened. He had never seen her look so frightened. When she came up beside him she was breathless. “Mary?” he said. “What is it?”

“Jeremy, I — please don’t take the children.”

He felt as if she had hit him in the stomach. While she gasped for breath he did too, clenching his end of the rope. “I’m sorry,” Mary said. “It’s just that I — well, I was just about to feed them. Why don’t you leave them with me? You’ll only be gone a little while.”

Of course he shouldn’t take them. He knew that too. But to have her stand there telling him that, saying she was willing for him to go himself but not to take the children! She thought his silence meant that he was simply being stubborn. “Or, I know what,” she said, trying a new tone. “I’ll come along. How will that be?” She smiled up at him. The children murmured encouragement. She laid a hand gently on his arm. “Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t it be better if we all went out together?”

“Get away from me,” he said.

Her hand dropped. Her smile vanished so suddenly it seemed to have broken and shattered.

“Just leave me alone, leave me be,” he said. “And you,” he told the children. “Get out.”

They came awkwardly, stumbling over each other and keeping their eyes on him instead of the ground. “Jeremy?” said Mary. Her voice was thin and choked, but he didn’t look at her. As soon as the last child was on dry land he bent over the boat, gave it a long shove, and then hopped in, as neatly as if he had done it all his life. The only thing that gave him away was the violent trembling of his knees as he bent to sit down. The whole boat trembled. He pretended not to notice. He reached for the oars, fitted them into the oarlocks, and after a few dry swoops hit water and pulled. The dinghy set off with a start. But was he facing in the right direction? He thought of Winslow Homer’s paintings; he tried to remember which way the men in dinghies had been pulling. It would be just like him to perform this entire task sitting backwards. He splashed himself a few times, then plowed too deep, and took a while to realize which oar to lift when he veered to one side. The dinghy kept jerking ahead and then losing half the gain before he could manage another stroke, but when he looked over his shoulder he saw that he was making progress. He knew he would get there eventually. He turned to look at the shore again and found Mary and the children lined up, watching. Their faces were small and white and featureless. The only sound that came from them was the shrill tweet of Edward’s whistle, which he blew in an absent-minded way as he faced out toward the water. Then Hannah’s whistle, copying Edward’s, but hers was softer and the creaking of the oars nearly drowned it out.

He thought it took about half an hour to reach Brian’s boat. Maybe more. Another man could no doubt have done it in five minutes. He felt the nudge and scrape of the dinghy against painted wood, and he turned and reached for the ledge that ran around the deck. But how would he secure the dinghy? Slowly, now. He mustn’t rush. He thought for a long time, then passed the end of the dinghy’s rope very cautiously around a cable that rose from the deck of the ketch. Above all, he worried about falling into the gap between the two boats. He would not even stand to fasten the rope. He remained seated, straining upward, tying knot upon knot until he had a long chain of them that would certainly not slip out no matter what. Then he clung to the side of the ketch and rose by inches. He took a deep breath, hoisted himself upward, and there he was — kneeling on the deck of a sailboat, alone, with no more ill effects than the loss of his golf cap to the black greasy water and a tingling echo of fear in the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet.

He rose and made his way toward the sails. Walking on a ketch was no trouble at all, nothing like standing in a dinghy. He felt he could breathe freely again. Still, he didn’t turn to look at his family. The sound of their whistles trilled in his ears — four or five whistles, now, so he knew they must still be there, but he kept his back to them and pretended they were gone. For him, they were gone. He had never felt so isolated. Gulls slid through the air about him as white as drifting ashes, and the water dabbled softly around the edges of the boat while the dinghy scraped rhythmically against its hull. He found ropes twined around the sails, holding them furled, but it wasn’t hard to loosen them or to figure out how to raise them. First the biggest one, then the middle-sized one, then the little triangular scrap out front. They fluttered and flapped and crackled. Jeremy sat down on a deckseat to wait for them to dry. Every time a gust of wind blew up the sails would fill and the boat would move, but it seemed securely moored and Jeremy didn’t worry. He was beyond worry. The boat scudded around its mooring in wider and faster circles and the children on shore piped it on its journey with tin whistles while Jeremy, slumped on his deckseat, blinked his tears away and watched his gray golf cap bob off across a wave and grow dark and heavy and finally sink.