The Sign of the Compass

The needle had pointed east-north-east all the way from Nashville, and Mara had let it.

It was September now, the heat finally going out of the brick, and the walnut box sat on the kitchen table in Fishtown with its lid open, and the blued needle lay on its pivot pointing nowhere far: across the room, through the wall, a few streets east. Mara had stopped expecting it to make sense the first time. It always did, later.

The country Mara had come home to was very nearly the one Mara remembered. That was the strange part. The amendment had been ratified on the eighteenth of August 1920, by one vote, in the same hot room, and certified in Washington eight days later; the women of America had voted that November, as they always had. Only one thing had moved, and Mara kept finding it. The photograph. In Mara's own world there had never been one: the Secretary of State had signed the proclamation at home, early in the morning, with nobody watching. Here there was. It was in every textbook and on a stamp and over the door of the League of Women Voters office on Walnut Street: a plain office, a man at a desk with a pen, and behind him, standing close, four women. Carrie Chapman Catt, grey and upright. Alice Paul, small and very still, who had not been invited and had come anyway. And at the end of the row, a little apart and looking straight at the camera, a Nashville schoolteacher in a dark hat, J. Frankie Pierce. The caption under the stamp said The Thirty-Sixth State, 26 August 1920. Children knew her name. A girl on the train out of Nashville had been doing a worksheet about her. Mara had looked at that photograph on the girl's tray table for most of an hour, and thought about a telegram Mara had carried down a hill, and about a doorman who had looked at a card and handed it back.

Marisa's shop was three blocks down Frankford Avenue, and the bell over the door rang the way it always rang. The long narrow room, the lamps, the chairs, the case of watches, and at the back the desk with the receipt pad printed Tenney & Daughters. Marisa was behind it, glasses on, pencil in her hair, a radio murmuring by her elbow. It was the share programme, the woman with the dry warm voice, saying the Fishtown clinic had a new roof.

"Well," she said. "You came. Bring it here."

Mara put the ledger on the blotter between them and opened it to the place.

The stations ran down the pages as they always had, one to a line, in their different hands. Philad.a, July 1776, in the round brown hand from the lid. Washington City, April 1865, in the hand nobody knew. Houston, July 1969, in Delia Penhallow's upright schoolteacher's print. And then Nashville, 18 Aug. 1920, in Ione Overbey's quick stenographer's hand, and beside it, in the margin, fresh and black and certain, a stake mark: an upright stroke with a crossbar.

Under it, the next line. A different hand. Broad, confident, a little flourished on the capitals, the hand of somebody who had lettered for money her whole life.

Philad.a, 10 May 1876.

Marisa did not look at it. She looked past Mara, at the wall beside the door, and Mara turned.

The frame had hung there as long as Mara had been coming into the shop, and Mara had never once read it properly. A receipt, foxed and brown, behind old glass. A printed head in a plain fat Clarendon, and the rest written in by hand: Tenney & Daughters, Sign & Ornamental Painters, at the Sign of the Compass, Second St. Rec'd of the Bureau of Installation, International Exhibition, for lettering, gilding and hanging of forty-two exhibitors' signs, the sum of … and a figure, and a date in May, and a signature. K. Tenney.

The same hand. The same flourish on the capitals. There was no question about it at all.

"My great-great-grandmother," said Marisa. "Kezia. She had the shop on Second Street, by the river, when it was all sail-lofts and ship chandlers. The family kept that receipt a hundred and fifty years because it was the biggest job she ever did." She took her glasses off. "And now it's in your book."

Mara looked from the frame to the page and back, and felt the thing Mara had felt three times before, in a back room in Germantown and a cellar in Washington and a hot corridor in Nashville: the floor of the world tilting a degree, very gently, toward a door. Somebody had sat at a table a hundred and fifty years ago and written that line. Kezia Tenney, sign painter, widow, with paint under her fingernails. She had written it in a book that was not hers, on a page far past the last one anyone had used, and left the pages between blank, as if she had known exactly how many other people would need them first.

In the open box on the blotter the needle swung, and settled, and Mara took a bearing on it out of pure habit. Not out of the city this time. Not even out of the neighbourhood. South-south-east, across Fishtown, toward the river. Toward Second Street.

Mara lifted the lid and looked at the label inside it, the paper label that had been there since the estate sale, brown and foxed, printed from engraved copper. E. Penhallow. Mathematical Instrument Maker. Second Street, Philad.a.

Mara closed the lid on the label and asked, as lightly as possible, where exactly on Second Street the old shop had been.

"Below Laurel," said Marisa. "Near the river. Why?" She did not wait for an answer; she seldom did. "My grandmother used to say the Tenneys took the house over from the instrument people. That's what she called them. The instrument people. As if everybody knew who they were. Delia knew. Delia and my grandmother used to sit in that back room and laugh about something for hours." She shrugged. "It's a parking lot now. Beside a rowhouse with a blue door."

The rules were the same as they had always been, and Mara said them over that night in the kitchen like a checklist. The needle points at a hinge, never at north. Go where it settles. At first light, stand there, raise the sights, look along it. You arrive on that spot, on the hinge's first day, dressed for it, with a letter that gets you through one door. You stay until the day is decided and the needle swings north. What you change stays changed, and only you remember. Never the same day twice; never your own lifetime. And the book first, before the place.

Before dawn Mara walked it. Down Frankford, under the El, past the bars with their shutters down and a bakery with its lights on, and across Girard, and down toward the river through streets that had been sail-lofts and rope-walks and shipyards once, and were rowhouses and parking now, and a highway roaring on stilts between the city and the water. The needle led the whole way, a little ahead of the bearing, like a dog on a lead that knows the house.

At a quarter to six on a grey Tuesday morning Mara stood in a parking lot on Second Street, beside a rowhouse with a blue door, with the ledger in a canvas bag and the walnut box open in both hands. A delivery van idled at the corner. Gulls came up off the river. Somebody's radio, in an upstairs window of the rowhouse, was playing the news low, and a cat watched Mara from the blue door's step with an expression of professional contempt. There was nothing here. Asphalt, a pay machine, a chain-link fence with a bus-shelter advertisement for a bank.

The needle pointed at the ground under Mara's feet, which it had never done before, and then, as the light came, it lifted its point a hair, as if at something just above eye level, a sign that was not there.

Mara opened out the sights, and looked along them, and there was a sound like a breath drawn in.