Anne Tyler - Celestial Navigation  

Praise for Anne Tyler

One of the most beguiling and mesmerizing writers in America.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Not merely good She is wickedly good!

John Updike

A novelist who knows what a proper story is A very funny writer Not only a good and artful writer, but a wise one as well.

Newsweek

Tylers characters have character: quirks, odd angles of vision, colorful mean streaks, and harmonic longings.

Time

Her people are triumphantly alive.

The New York Times

ALSO BY ANNE TYLER

If Morning Ever Comes
The Tin Can Tree
A Slipping-Down Life
The Clock Winder
Celestial Navigation
Searching for Caleb
Earthly Possessions
Morgans Passing
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
The Accidental Tourist
Breathing Lessons
Saint Maybe
Ladder of Years
A Patchwork Planet
Back When We Were Grownups
The Amateur Marriage
Digging to America

A Fawcett Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright 1974 by Anne Tyler Modarressi

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Fawcett Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Fawcett Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.ballantinebooks.com

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-96701

eISBN: 978-0-307-78827-6

This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

v3.1

My brother Jeremy is a thirty-eight-year-old bachelor who never did leave home. Long ago we gave up expecting very much of him, but still he is the last man in our family and you would think that in time of tragedy he might pull himself together and take over a few of the responsibilities. Well, he didnt. He telephoned my sister and me in Richmond, where we have a little apartment together. If memory serves me it was the first time in his life he had ever placed a call to us; can you imagine? Ordinarily we phoned Mother every Sunday evening when the rates were down and then she would put Jeremy on the line to say hello. Which was about all he did say: Hello, and Fine, thank you, and then a long breathing pause and, Well, goodbye now. So when I heard his voice that night I had trouble placing it for a moment. Amanda? he said, and I said, Yes? Who is it?

I wanted to tell you about Mama, Jeremy said.

Thats what he calls her still: Mama. Laura and I switched to Mother when we were grown but Jeremy didnt.

I said, Jeremy? Is something wrong?

Mama has passed on, he told me.

And I said, Oh, dear Lord in heaven.

Then Laura and I had to make all the arrangements by long distance, had to call the doctor for the death certificate and track down the minister, had to help Jeremy find a funeral parlor. (It seems he had never learned how to work the yellow pages.) Had to catch a train to Baltimore the next day and locate a taxi that would carry us from the station. It didnt occur to Jeremy that at a time like this we might like to be met. What would he have met us in, anyway; he had no notion of how to drive. But some men can take things in hand even arriving by city bus, hailing another bus home again and seeing to it their sisters have seats and keeping watch over their bags. Not Jeremy. Laura and I walked out of the station on a rainy cold November noon and found not a single familiar face, not even a redcap in sight, no taxis waiting at the curb. We had to sit shivering on our suitcases with our feet tucked under us and plastic rainscarves over our hats. Oh, Amanda, Laura said, that cold of yours will go straight to your chest. For I had been ill for two weeks before this, just barely managing to continue with my classes, as I distrust substitute teachers. I shouldnt have been out at all. And now Laura looked as if she were coming down with something. Folding and refolding a flowered handkerchief, blowing into it and then wiping the tip of her nose. She wore her maroon knit, which was supposed to slim her some but didnt. Bulges showed in the gape of her coat. I was in my good black wool with the rhinestone buttons, and my squirrel-collar coat and my gray bird-wing hat that exactly matches my hair. But I might as well not have bothered. The plastic scarf and the Rain Dears spoiled the effect. Wouldnt you think that Jeremy would at least know how to dial a taxi and have it waiting at the station?

Then when we finally did find a cab there was some confusion about where we wanted to go. Laura said straight to the funeral parlor. She was always closer to Mother than I was and had acted much more emotional about her passing, sat up most of the night before crying and carrying on. Well, Lord knows it was a shock to me as well but I am the oldestforty-six, though people tell me I dont look itand I have always been the sensible one. I said we would have to drop our suitcases, wouldnt we? And surely Jeremy would be seeing to things at the funeral parlor. He could manage that much, couldnt he? Laura said, Oh, well, I dont know, Amanda. So in the end I told her we would go on to the funeral parlor but just stop off first at the house, leave our suitcases and make sure where Jeremy was. The driver said, Now can we get going? A put-upon type. But at least he kept quiet, once we were out in traffic. I despise how some taxi drivers will just talk on and on in that tough way they have, giving out their opinions on politics and the cost of living and crime in the streets and other matters I have no interest in.

Our mothers house was smack in the middle of the city on a narrow busy street, one of those thin dark three-storey Baltimore rowhouses. A clutter of leaded panes and straggly ivy and grayish lace curtains dragging their bottoms behind the black screens. The sidewalk leading up to it could break a persons ankle, and yellowy-brown weeds were growing in the cracks. A stained cardboard sign reading ROOMS TO LET was propped in the parlor window. The neighborhood was running down, had been for years. Most places had split into apartments and gone over to colored and beatniks, and a few were even boarded up, with city notices plastered across the doors. I told Mother time and time again that she should move but she never got up the energy. She was a stagnant kind of person. I hate to say it now shes gone but there you are. She didnt even notice what the neighborhood had turned into. She hardly ever left the house. And over the years all her possessions had piled around her so, her knickknacks and photographs and her shoeboxes full of bits of string. It would have taken three vans just to move her. When we drew up in front of the door I could see the beginnings of her clutter already: the little scrap of a front yard packed with weeds and spiny shrubs and one great long dead rambling rosebush that had woven itself into everything. That will tell you a good deal about the way she looked at things. She caused no changes; that was Mother for you. She hadnt the courage. If she saw that crack snaking through the mortar or the grillwork fence slowly leaning toward the ground, all she thought was, well, but who am I to alter it? I have no patience with people like that.