Morgan's Passing

by Anne Tyler

  “Ha.”

  He was employed by Bonny’s family, managing one of their hardware stores. He had always been a tinkering, puttering, hardware sort of a man. Back in graduate school, his advisor had once complained because Morgan had spent a whole conference period squatting in the corner, talking over his shoulder while he worked on a leaky radiator pipe.

  WANTED. Barmaid, dog groomer, forklift operator.

  What he liked were those ads with character. (Driver to chauffeur elderly gentleman, some knowledge of Homer desirable.) Occasionally he would even answer one. He would even take a job for a couple of days, vanishing from the hardware store and leaving his clerk in charge. Then Bonny’s Uncle Ollie would find out and come storming to Bonny, and Bonny would sigh and laugh and ask Morgan what he thought he was doing. He would say this for Bonny: she didn’t get too wrought up about things. She just sloped along with him, more or less. He reached out for her, now, as she passed with a pitcher of orange juice. He crooked an arm around her hips, or tried to; she had her mind on something else. “Where’s Brindle? Where’s your mother?” she asked him. “I thought I heard your mother hours ago.”

  He laid the classified ads aside and tugged another section from beneath him: the news. But there was nothing worth reading. Plane crashes, train crashes, tenement fires … He flipped to the obituaries. “Mrs. Grimm. Opera Enthusiast,” he read aloud. “Tilly Abbott, Thimble Collector. Ah, Lord.”

  His daughters had begun to seep downstairs. They were quarreling in the hall and dropping books, and their transistor radios seemed to be playing several different songs at once. A deep, rocky drumbeat thudded beneath electric guitars.

  “Peter Jacobs, at 44,” Morgan read. “Forty-four! What kind of age is that to die?”

  “Girls!” Bonny called. “Your eggs are getting cold.”

  “I hate it when they won’t say what did a man in,” Morgan told her. “Even ‘a lengthy illness’—I mean, a lengthy illness would be better than nothing. But all they have here is ‘passed on unexpectedly.’ ” He hunched forward to let someone sidle behind him. “Forty-four years old! Of course it was unexpected. You think it was a heart attack? Or what?”

  “Morgan, I wish you wouldn’t put such stock in obituaries,” Bonny said.

  She had to raise her voice; the girls had taken over the kitchen by now. All of them were talking at once about history quizzes, boys and more boys, motorcycles, basketball games, who had borrowed whose record album and never given it back. A singer was rumored to be dead. (Someone said she would die herself if that were true.) Amy was doing something to the toaster. The twins were mixing their health-food drink in the blender. A French book flew out of nowhere and hit Liz in the small of the back. “I can’t go on living here any more,” Liz said. “I don’t get a moment’s peace. Everybody picks on me. I’m leaving.” But all she did was pour herself a cup of coffee and sit down next to Morgan. “For heaven’s sake,” she said to Bonny, “what’s that he got on his head?”

  “Feel free to address me directly,” Morgan told her. “I have the answer, as it happens. Don’t be shy.”

  “Does he have to wear those hats of his? Even in the house he wears them. Does he have to look so peculiar?”

  This was his thirteen-year-old. Once he might have been offended, but he was used to it by now. Along about age eleven or twelve, it seemed they totally changed. He had loved them when they were little. They had started out so small and plain, chubby and curly and even-tempered, toddling devotedly after Morgan, and then all at once they went on crash diets, grew thin and irritable, and shot up taller than their mother. They ironed their hair till it hung like veils. They traded their dresses for faded jeans and skimpy little T-shirts. And their taste in boyfriends was atrocious. Just atrocious. He couldn’t believe some of the creatures they brought home with them. On top of all that, they stopped thinking Morgan was so wonderful. They claimed he was an embarrassment. Couldn’t he shave his beard off? Cut his hair? Act his age? Dress like other fathers? Why did he smoke those unfiltered cigarettes and pluck those tobacco shreds from his tongue? Did he realize that he hummed incessantly underneath his breath, even at the dinner table, even now while they were asking him these questions?

  He tried to stop humming. He briefly switched to a pipe, but the mouthpiece cracked in two when he bit it. And once he got a shorter haircut than usual and trimmed his beard so it was square and hugged the shape of his jaw. It looked artificial, they told him. It looked like a wooden beard, they said.

  He felt he was riding something choppy and violent, fighting to keep his balance, smiling beatifically and trying not to blink.

  “See that? He’s barefoot,” Liz said.

  “Hush and pour that coffee back,” Bonny told her. “You know you’re not allowed to drink coffee yet.”

  The youngest, Kate, came in with a stack of schoolbooks. She was not quite eleven and still had Bonny’s full-cheeked, cheery face. As she passed behind Morgan’s chair, she plucked his hat off, kissed the back of his head, and replaced the hat.

  “Sugar-pie,” Morgan said.

  Maybe they ought to have another baby.

  With everyone settled around this table, you couldn’t even bend your elbows. Morgan decided to retreat. He rose and ducked out of the room backward, like someone leaving the presence of royalty, so they wouldn’t see the comics section he was hiding behind him. He padded into the living room. One of the radios was playing “Plastic Fantastic Lover” and he paused to do a little dance, barefoot on the rug. His mother watched him sternly from the couch. She was a small, hunched old lady with hair that was still jet black; it was held flat with tortoise-shell combs from which it crinkled and bucked like something powerful. She sat with her splotched, veined hands folded in her lap; she wore a drapy dress that seemed several sizes too large for her. “Why aren’t you at breakfast?” Morgan asked.

  “Oh, I’ll just wait till all this has died down.”

  “But then Bonny’ll be in the kitchen half the morning.”

  “When you get to be my age,” Louisa said, “why, food is near about everything there is, and I don’t intend to rush it. I want a nice, hot English muffin, split with a fork, not a knife, with butter melting amongst the crumbs, and a steaming cup of coffee laced with whipping cream. And I want it in peace. I want it in quiet.”

  “Bonny’s going to have a fit,” he said.

  “Don’t be silly. Bonny doesn’t mind such things.”

  She was probably right. (Bonny was infinitely expansible, taking everything as it came. It was Morgan who felt oppressed by his mother’s living here.) He sighed and settled next to her on the couch. He opened out his paper. “Isn’t this a weekday?” she asked him.

  “Yes,” he mumbled.

  She crooked a finger over the top of his paper and pulled it down so she could see his face. “Aren’t you going to work?”

  “By and by.”

  “By and by? It’s seven-thirty, Morgan and you don’t even have your shoes on. Do you know what I’ve done so far today? Made my bed, watered my ferns, polished the chrome in my bathroom; and meanwhile here you sit reading the comics, and your sister’s sleeping like the dead upstairs. What is this with my children? Where do they get this? By and by you say!”

  He gave up. He folded the paper and said, “All right, Mother.”

  “Have a nice day,” she told him serenely.

  When he left the room, she was sitting with her hands in her lap again, trustful as a child, waiting for her English muffin.

  2

  Wearing a pair of argyle socks that didn’t go at all with his Klondike costume, and crusty leather boots to cover them up, and his olive-drab parka from Sunny’s Surplus, Morgan loped along the sidewalk. His hardware store was deep in the city, too far to travel on foot, and unfortunately his car was spread all over the floor of his garage and he hadn’t quite finished putting it back together. He would have to take the bus. He headed toward the transit stop, puffing on a cigar
ette that he held between thumb and forefinger, sending out a cloud of smoke from beneath the brim of his hat. He passed a row of houses, an apartment building, then a little stream of drugstores and newsstands and dentists’ offices. Under one arm he carried a brown paper bag with his moccasins inside. They went with his Daniel Boone outfit. He’d worn them so often that the soft leather soles had broken through at the ball of the foot. When he reached the corner, he swerved in at Fresco’s Shoe Repair to leave them off. He liked the smell of Fresco’s: leather and machine oil. Maybe he should have been a cobbler.

  But when he entered, jingling the cowbell above the door, he found no one there—just the counter with its clutter of awls and pencils and receipt forms, the pigeonholes behind it crammed with shoes, and a cup of coffee cooling beside the skeletal black sewing machine. “Fresco?” he called.

  “Yo,” Fresco said from the rear.

  Morgan laid his package down and went behind the counter. He pulled out a copper-toed work boot. Where would one buy such things? They really would be useful, he felt; really very practical. The cowbell jingled again. A fat woman in a fur cape came in, no doubt from one of those new apartment buildings. All down the edge of her cape, small animals’ heads hung, gnashing their teeth on their own spindly tails. She set a spike-heeled evening sandal firmly on the counter. “I’d like to know what you’re going to do about this,” she said.

  “Do?” said Morgan.

  “You can see the heel has broken again. It broke right off while I was walking into the club, and you were the people who’d repaired it. I looked like an utter fool, a clod.”

  “Well, what can I say?” Morgan asked her. “This shoe is Italian.”

  “So?”

  “It has hollow heels.”

  “It does?”

  They both looked at the heel. It wasn’t hollow at all.

  “Oh, we see a lot of this,” Morgan told her. He stamped out his cigarette and picked up the sandal. “These shoes from Italy, they come with hollow heels so drugs can be smuggled in. So naturally they’re weakened. The smugglers pry the heels off, take no care whatsoever; they don’t have the slightest feeling for their work. They slam the heels back any old how, sell the shoes to some unsuspecting shop … but of course they’ll never be the same. Oh, the stories I could tell you!”

  He shook his head. She looked at him narrowly; faint, scratchy lines deepened around her eyes.

  “Ah, well,” he said, sighing. “Friday morning, then. Name?”

  “Well … Peterson,” she said.

  He scrawled it on the back of a receipt, and set it with the sandal in a cubbyhole.

  After she was gone, he wrote out instructions for his moccasins: GOWER. FIX! Can’t live without them. He put the moccasins next to the sandal, with the instructions rolled inside. Then he trotted on out of the shop, busily lighting another cigarette beneath the shelter of his hat.

  On the sidewalk his mother’s dog was waiting for him. She had a cocked, hopeful face and two perked ears like tepees. Morgan stopped dead. “Go home,” he told her. She wagged her tail. “Go home. What do you want of me? What have I done?”

  Morgan set off toward the bus stop. The dog followed, whining, but Morgan pretended not to hear. He speeded up. The whining continued. He wheeled around and stamped one foot. A man in an overcoat halted and then circled Morgan at a distance. The dog, however, merely cowered, panting and looking expectant. “Why must you drag after me like this?” Morgan asked. He made a rush at her, but she stood her ground. Of course he should lead her home himself, but he couldn’t face it. He couldn’t backtrack all that way, having started out so speedy and chipper. Instead he turned and took off at a run, holding on to his hat, pounding down the sidewalk with the dog not far behind. The dog began to lose heart. Morgan felt her lose it, though he didn’t dare turn to look. He felt her falter and then stop, gazing after him and spasmodically wagging her tail. Morgan clutched his aching chest and stumbled up onto a bus. Puffing and sweating, he rummaged through his pockets for change. The other passengers darted sidelong glances and then looked away again.

  They passed more stores and office buildings. They whizzed through a corner of Morgan’s old neighborhood, with most of the windows boarded up and trees growing out of caved-in roofs. (It had not done well without him.) Here were the Arbeiter Mattress Factory and Madam Sheba, All Questions Answered and Love Problems Cheerfully Solved. Rowhouses slid by, each more decayed than the one before. Morgan hunkered in his seat, clutching the metal bar in front of him, gazing at the Ace of Spades Sandwich Shop and Fat Boy’s Shoeshine. Now he was farther downtown than he had ever lived. He relaxed his grip on the metal bar. He sank into the lives of the scattered people sitting on their stoops: the woman in her nightgown and vinyl jacket nursing a Rolling Rock beer and breathing frost; the two men nudging each other and laughing; the small boy in a grownup’s sneakers hugging a soiled white cat. A soothing kind of emptiness began to spread through him. He felt stripped and free, like the vacant windows, frameless, glassless, on the upper floors of Syrenia’s Hot Pig Bar-B-Q.

  3

  The downtown branch of Cullen Hardware was so old and dark and filthy, so thick with smells, so narrow and creaking, that Morgan often felt he was not so much entering it as plunging in, head first, leaving just his bootsoles visible on the rim. There was a raised platform at the rear, underneath the rafters, for his office: a scarred oak desk, files, a maroon plush settee, and a steep black Woodstock typewriter whose ribbons he had to wind by hand. This used to be Bonny’s grandfather’s office. This store was Grandfather Cullen’s very first establishment. Now there were branches everywhere, of course. Nearly every shopping mall within a fifty-mile radius had a Cullen Hardware. But they were all slick and modern; this was the only real one. Sometimes Bonny’s Uncle Ollie would come in and threaten to close it down. “Call this a store?” he would say. “Call this a paying proposition?” He would glare around him at the bulky wooden shelves, where the Black & Decker power tools looked foolish beside the old-fashioned bins of nails. He would scowl at the rusty window grilles, which had been twisted out of shape by several different burglars. Morgan would just smile, anxiously tugging his beard, for he knew that he tended to irk Uncle Ollie and he was better off saying nothing at all. Then Uncle Ollie would storm out again and Morgan would go back to his office, relieved, humming beneath his breath. Not that closing this branch down would have left him unemployed; for Bonny’s sake, the Cullens would feel bound to find him something else. But here he had more scope. He had half a dozen projects under way in his office—lumber stacked against the stairs, a ball-peen hammer in his OUT basket. He knew of a good place to eat not far off. He had friends just a few blocks over. His one clerk, Butkins, did nearly all the work, even if he wasn’t so interesting to talk to.

  Once, a few years back, Morgan had had a girl clerk named Marie. She was a very young, round-faced redhead who always wore a loose gray smock to protect her clothes from the dust. Morgan started pretending she was his wife. It wasn’t that he found her all that appealing; but he slowly built this scene in his mind where she and he were the owners of a small-town Ma-and-Pa hardware store. They’d been childhood sweethearts, maybe. Mentally, he aged her. He would have liked her to have white hair. He started wearing a wrinkled gray jacket and gray work trousers; he thought of himself as “Pa Hardware.” The funny thing was, sometimes he could be looking right at her but daydreaming her from scratch, as if she weren’t there. Then one afternoon he was standing on the ladder putting some shelves in order and she was handing him boxes of extension cords, and he happened to lean down and kiss her on the cheek. He said, “You look tired, Ma. Maybe you ought to take a little nap.” The girl had gasped but said nothing. The next day she didn’t show up for work, and she never came again. Her gray smock still hung in the stockroom. Occasionally, when he passed it, Morgan felt sad all over again for the days when he had been Pa Hardware.

  But now he had this Butkins, this efficien
t, colorless young fellow already setting out a new display of Rubbermaid products in the window. “Morning,” Morgan told him. He went on up to his office. He took off his parka, hung it on the coat tree, and sat down in the cracked leather swivel chair behind his desk. Supposedly, he would be dealing with the paperwork now-typing up orders, filing invoices. Instead he opened the center drawer and pulled out his bird-feeder plans. He was building the feeder for Bonny. Next Tuesday was their anniversary. They had been married for nineteen years; good God. He unrolled the plans and studied them, running a nicotine-stained finger across the angles of various levels and compartments. The feeder hung by a post in which he would drill four suet holes—or peanut-butter holes, for Bonny claimed that suet caused cholesterol problems. Morgan smiled to himself. Bonny was a little crazy on this subject of birds, he thought. He weighted the plans flat with a stapler and a pack of drill bits, and went to find a good plank to begin on.

  For most of the morning he sawed and sanded and hummed, occasionally pausing to push back his hat and wipe his face on his sleeve. His office stairs made a fine sawhorse. At the front of the store a trickle of shoppers chose their single purchases: a mousetrap, a furnace filter, a can of roach spray. Morgan hummed the “W.P.A. Blues” and chiseled a new point on his pencil.

  Then Butkins went to an early lunch, leaving Morgan in charge. Morgan had to rise and dust off his knees, regretfully, and wait on a man in coveralls who wanted to buy a Hide-a-Key. “What for?” Morgan asked. “Why spend good money on a little tin box? Do you see the price on this thing?”

  “Well, but last week I locked the keys inside my car, don’t you know, and I was thinking how maybe I could hide an extra key beneath the—”

  “Look,” said Morgan. “All you do is take a piece of dental floss, waxed. Surely you have dental floss. Thread your extra key on it, double it for strength, tie it to your radiator grille and let the key hang down inside. Simple! Costs you nothing.”