Morgan's Passing

by Anne Tyler

  Now that she thought back, Emily felt she really should have prepared Mrs. Meredith. It was too theatrical—bursting in with an unannounced grandchild. It was more like something Leon would have done. She seemed to have caught some of Leon’s qualities. He seemed to have caught some of hers. (He seldom spoke of moving on any more.) She was reminded of those parking-lot accidents where one car’s fender grazes another’s. It had always puzzled her that on each fender, some of the other car’s paint appeared. You’d think the paint would only be on one car, not both. It was as if they had traded colors.

  She tried to tell Leon about the lunch, once it had taken place. She led into it gradually. “Your mother’s been writing me now, you know,” she said.

  But Leon said, “Emily, I don’t want to hear about it and I don’t want you to have anything to do with it. Is that clear?”

  “All right, Leon,” Emily said.

  And, oddly enough, even Mrs. Meredith seemed content to let things be. It seemed she only wanted the connection; just who made the connection didn’t matter so much. She liked to hear from Emily what Leon was up to. Did he help to care for Gina? “He walks her at night, and he baby-sits while I’m working in the shop,” Emily told her, “but he can’t yet bring himself to change a diaper.”

  “Exactly like Burt was,” Mrs. Meredith said. “Oh, exactly!” But she never tried to press any closer than that. Maybe she found things easier as they were. She often retreated into stories about Leon’s childhood, when he had been someone she could understand. “He was a beautiful baby,” she said. “All the nurses told me so. Prettiest baby they’d ever seen! They couldn’t believe their eyes!” Somehow, everything she said had a way of slipping out of her control. “Even the doctors stopped by to take a look. This one man, a heart surgeon, he came straight from an operation just to get a glimpse of him. ‘Mrs. Meredith,’ he said, ‘I never saw a baby so beautiful in my life. Yes, sir, we’re going to hear more of that young man. He’s going to amount to something someday!’ He called his wife on the telephone; I heard him in the hall. ‘You ought to see this baby we’ve got here! Ought to see this baby!’ ” Next, Emily thought, there’d be a star beaming over the delivery room. She began to understand why Leon got so edgy around his mother. Mrs. Meredith’s rouged face, gazing brightly at a boy no one else could see, seemed deliberately shuttered and obstinate.

  In fact, she made Emily feel edgy as well, and Emily never enjoyed these lunches, or came any closer to liking Mrs. Meredith. Telling her a piece of news—or even speaking to Gina in Mrs. Meredith’s presence—Emily heard her own voice take on a fulsome tone that wasn’t hers at all. She felt that nothing she could say would ever live up to Mrs. Meredith’s expectations. But what could she do? The very day after their lunch at the Elmwood, Mrs. Meredith started driving lessons. In a month she had her license and a brand-new Buick, and she drove the entire distance from Richmond to Baltimore although, she said, she was scared to death of multi-lane highways and disliked going over thirty miles per hour. When she telephoned Emily from a corner booth, breathlessly announcing, “I did it! I’m here to take you to lunch,” could Emily just say, “No, thank you,” and hang up?

  They settled into a schedule: the first Wednesday of every month. Emily never told Leon about it. She knew that, eventually, Gina would tell. Now that Gina could talk, it was only a matter of time. “When me and Grandma was eating …” she’d say, and Leon would say, “You and who?” and then all hell would break loose. Till then, Emily went dutifully to lunch, frowning slightly with concentration.

  One time Mr. Meredith came too. He seemed baffled by the baby. He let his wife do all the talking, while he stared around at the dingy old men slurping soup in the E-Z Cafeteria. “So where’s this son of mine?” he asked finally.

  “He’s … very busy at home,” Emily said.

  “Would you believe he was once the size of this little tyke?” he asked, jutting his chin at Gina. “I could carry him in the palm of my hand. Now we’re not on speaking terms.”

  “Burt,” said Mrs. Meredith.

  “He was always quick to throw things away.”

  Later, when it was time to go, he asked Emily if she had all her equipment.

  “Equipment?” Emily said.

  “Equipment. You know.”

  Maybe he was asking if she were sane, marrying his son.

  But then he said, “Crib, playpen, high chair, carriage …”

  “Oh. We don’t need all that,” Emily said. “She sleeps in a cardboard box. It’s perfectly comfortable.”

  “I’ll send her a crib,” Mr. Meredith said.

  “No, Mr. Meredith, please don’t do that.”

  “I’ll send her one tomorrow. Imagine! A cardboard box!” he said, and he went away shaking his head and looking pleased, as if his expectations, at least, had every one been fulfilled.

  The crib arrived: white, spooled, with an eyelet canopy. She’d never heard of such nonsense. Two delivery men came puffing up the stairs with it and leaned it, unassembled, against the wall in the hallway. She reached a finger inside a plastic bag and touched an eyelet ruffle. Then Leon walked in, tossing from hand to hand the cabbage she’d asked him to get at the market. “What’s all this?” he asked.

  “Your parents sent it,” she said.

  He took a step backward from the crib.

  “Leon,” she said. “While we’re on the subject, I ought to tell you something.”

  He said, “I don’t want to hear, I don’t want to know, and I want this monstrosity gone by the time I get back.”

  Then he turned and left, still carrying the cabbage.

  Emily thought it over. She mashed a banana for Gina’s supper and fed it to her, absently taking a few bites herself. She looked out the kitchen doorway and into the hall, where the crib stood slanting elegantly. At that time Gina was six months old, and outgrowing her cardboard box. She slept more often with her parents, still munching drowsily on Emily’s breast. It would be nice to have a safe container to keep her in, Emily thought. She scraped banana off Gina’s chin and stuffed it back into her mouth. She looked at the crib again.

  When Leon came back, the crib was still there, but he didn’t mention it. Maybe he’d been doing some thinking himself. The following day Emily started assembling it. She would join two pieces and then leave it a while, as if it were only something to fiddle with—a crossword puzzle, a hoop of needlework. Then she’d come back and tighten a bolt; then she’d leaf through the paper. In a few days she had a completed crib. It seemed silly to leave it obstructing the hall, so she wheeled it into their bedroom. The effect was dazzling. All that white made the rest of the room seem drab. Their mattress on the floor had a lumpy, beaten look.

  She went back to the hall for Gina and carried her into the bedroom and set her in the crib. Gina stared all around her at the eyelet ruffles, the decals, the bars. What a shock, she seemed to be saying. How did this imprisonment come about?

  It came about inch by inch. These things just wear you down.

  5

  This child had changed their lives past recognition, more than they had dreamed possible. You would think that someone so small could simply be fitted into a few spare crannies and the world could go on as usual, but it wasn’t like that at all. From the start, she seemed to consume them. Even as a tiny infant she was aggressively sociable and noisy and enthusiastic, an insomniac who seldom took naps and struggled continually toward a vertical position. They would lay her down on her stomach for the night and instantly her head would bob up again, weaving and unsteady, her eyes so wide that her forehead seemed corrugated. She loved to be talked to, sung to, tossed in the air. As she grew older, she fell in love with Red Riding Hood’s wolf and they had to give him up to her. If she slept at all, she slept with the wolf against her cheek and she dreamily twisted his red felt tongue. Periodically the tongue fell off and then she would go to pieces—crying and clinging to Emily till Emily sewed it back on. And she hated to be left. Ha
nnah Miles, across the hall, was glad to babysit, but any time Emily and Leon went out, Gina wept as if her heart would break and Emily would have to stay. Or Leon would make her leave anyway, really insist, and she would go, but her thoughts remained with Gina, and all through the movie or whatever she would fidget, buttoning and unbuttoning her coat, not hearing a word. Then Leon would be angry with her and they’d have a fight and the outing would be wasted, but later when they returned, Gina would be wide awake and smiling, at eleven or twelve at night, reading books with Hannah and hardly noticing they were back.

  They never asked, of course, whether she was worth it. They centered their lives on her. They could marvel forever at the small, chilly point of her nose, or her fat-ringed fingers or precisely cut mouth. When finally she fell asleep, the absence of all that fierce energy made the apartment feel desolate. Emily would drift through the rooms not knowing what to do next, though she’d wanted to do so much all day and never had a chance to begin. She wondered how they’d managed to produce such a child. She herself had always been so subdued and so anxious to please; Leon had Gina’s fire but none of her joyous good nature. Where did she get that? She was a changeling. She had arrived with someone else’s qualities. She was the gnome’s baby, not theirs.

  He stood in the Laundromat doorway with his hat pulled low and he sank back into the darkness as they passed. Sometimes the hat was pointed, sometimes flat, sometimes broad-brimmed. Sometimes it seemed he had aged, was slackening, falling apart as certain people suddenly do; he was seen in gold-rimmed spectacles and his beard was cut to such a stubble that he might merely have neglected shaving himself. Then later he would reappear miraculously young again, the spectacles gone, the beard in full bloom. On occasion he was not gnomish at all but a rather beakish, distinguished gentleman in suits so tidy you had the impression someone else had dressed him. On other occasions he could have stepped into a puppet show and not been out of place. He had a gait they would know anywhere, that seemed to belong to someone much younger—a reckless, bent-kneed, lunging gait, half running, landing on the balls of his feet. But once he was seen plodding out of a secondhand-clothing store with the resigned deliberation of a middle-aged man, and he had let his hair grow unsuitably long so it straggled in an unkempt and pathetic way over the back of his collar. At Christmas, Leon thought he saw him at a puppet show all the way over near Washington; but maybe it was just someone like him, he said. Then later he told Emily he’d been stupid—not for thinking it was he (the man was everywhere, after all), but for imagining there could be anyone else, anyplace, at any time, the faintest bit like Morgan.

  1971

  1

  Morgan’s oldest daughter was getting married. It seemed he had to find this out by degrees; nobody actually told him. All he knew was that over a period of months one young man began visiting more and more often, till soon a place was set for him automatically at suppertime and he was consulted along with the rest of the family when Bonny wanted to know what color to paint the dining room. His name was Jim. He had the flat, beige face of a department-store mannequin, and he seemed overly fond of crew-necked sweaters. And Morgan couldn’t think of a thing to say to him. All he had to do was look at this fellow and a peculiar kind of lassitude would seep through him. Suddenly he would be struck by how very little there was in this world that was worth the effort of speech, the entanglements of grammar and pronunciation and sufficient volume of voice.

  Then Amy started beginning every sentence with “we.” We think this and we hope that. And finally: when we’re earning a little more money; when we find a good apartment; when we have children of our own. This just crept in, so to speak. No announcements were made. One Sunday afternoon Bonny asked Morgan if he thought the back yard was too small for a reception. “Reception?” Morgan said.

  “And it’s not just the size; it’s the weather,” Bonny said. “What if it rains? You know how the weather can be in April.”

  “But this is already March,” Morgan said.

  “We’ll all sit down this evening,” said Bonny, “and come to some decision.”

  So Morgan went to his closet and chose an appropriate costume: a pinstriped suit he’d laid claim to after Bonny’s father died. It stood out too far at the shoulders, maybe, but he thought it might have been what Mr. Cullen was wearing when Morgan asked him for permission to marry Bonny. And certainly he’d been wearing his onyx cufflinks. Morgan found the cufflinks in the back of a drawer, and he spent some time struggling to slip them through the slick, starched cuffs of his only French-cuffed shirt.

  But when the four of them sat down for their discussion, no one consulted Morgan in any way whatsoever. All they talked about was food. Was it worthwhile calling in a caterer, or should they prepare the food themselves? Amy thought a caterer would be simplest. Jim, however, preferred that things be homemade. Morgan wondered how he could say that, having eaten so many suppers here. Bonny wasn’t much of a cook. She leaned heavily on sherry—several glugs of it in any dish that she felt needed more zip. Everything they ate, almost, tasted like New York State cocktail sherry.

  Morgan sat in the rocking chair and plucked out his beard, strand by strand. If he got up right now and left, he told himself, they might not even notice. He reflected on a long-standing grievance: there was one of Bonny’s pregnancies that she’d forgotten to inform him about. It was the time she’d been expecting Liz, or maybe Molly. Bonny always said he was mistaken; of course she’d told him, she recalled it clearly. But Morgan knew better. He suspected, even, that she’d neglected to tell him on purpose: he tended to get annoyed by her slapdash attitude toward various birth-control methods. To his certain knowledge, the very first inkling he’d had of that pregnancy was when Bonny arrived in the kitchen one morning wearing the baggy blue chambray shirt she habitually used as a maternity smock. He was positive he would have remembered if she’d mentioned it to him.

  “Amy will start down the stairs,” Bonny said. Evidently, they were planning the actual ceremony now. “Her father will meet her at the bottom and walk her to the center of the living room.”

  “Daddy, promise me you won’t wear one of your hats,” Amy said.

  Morgan rocked in his chair and plucked on, thinking of the tall black father-of-the-bride top hat he would purchase for the occasion. He knew just where he could find one: Tuxedo Tom’s Discount Formal Wear. He began to feel slightly happier.

  But later, when Jim and Amy had gone out, he sank into a spell of sadness. He thought of what a sunny child Amy had been when she was small. She’d had large, exaggerated curls swooping upward at each ear, so that she seemed to be wearing a Dutch cap. That Dutch-capped child, he thought, was whom he really mourned—not the present Amy, twenty-one years old, efficient secretary for a life-insurance company. He recalled how he had once worried over her safety. He’d been a much more anxious parent than Bonny. “You know,” he told Bonny, “I used to be so certain that one of the children would die. Or all of them, even—I could picture that. I was so afraid they’d be hit by cars, or kidnapped, or stricken with polio. I’d warn them to look both ways, not to run with scissors, never to play with ropes or knives or sharp sticks. ‘Relax,’ you’d say. Remember? But now look: it’s as if they died after all. Those funny little roly-poly toddlers, Amy in her OshKosh overalls—they’re dead, aren’t they? They did die. I was right all along. It’s just that it happened more slowly than I’d foreseen.”

  “Now, dear, this is just an ordinary life development,” Bonny told him.

  He looked at her. She was seated at the kitchen table, working on the guest list for the wedding. On the wall above her was something like a hat rack—a row of short wooden arms. When you pressed a pearl pushbutton anywhere in this house, there was a clunk from the kitchen gong and one of the wooden arms would fly up, alerting a non-existent servant. Beneath each arm a yellowed label identified the room that had rung—or (in the case of bedrooms) the person. Mr. Armand. Mrs. Armand. Miss Caroline. Master Keith
. Studying these labels, Morgan had the feeling that a younger, finer family lived alongside his, gliding through the hallways, calling for tea and hot-water bottles. Evenings, the mother sat by the fire in a white peignoir and read to her children, one on either side of her. A boy, a girl; how tidy. At dinner they discussed great books, and on Sunday they dressed up and went to church. They never quarreled. They never lost things or forgot things. They rang and waited serenely. They gazed beyond the Gowers with the placid, rapt expressions of theatregoers ignoring some petty disturbance in the row ahead.

  “I’d like to invite Aunt Polly,” Bonny said, “but that means Uncle Darwin, too, and he’s so deaf and difficult.”

  She was peering through black-framed, no-nonsense glasses, which she’d just started wearing for reading. Morgan said, “So did you die, when you think of it.”

  “Me?”

  “Where’s that girl I used to take out walking? I used to hold on to your arm, high up, and you would look off elsewhere and get pink, but you wouldn’t pull away.”

  Bonny added a name to her list. She said, “Walking? I don’t remember that. I thought we always drove.”

  He slid his fingers down the inside of her upper arm, where the skin was silkiest. The back of his hand brushed the weight of one breast. She didn’t seem to notice. She said, “Luckily, Jim doesn’t have many relatives.”