Morgan's Passing

by Anne Tyler

  “She must be marrying him out of desperation.”

  Then she did look up. She said, “Couldn’t you still love the girls anyhow? You don’t stop loving people just because they change size.”

  “Of course I love them.”

  “Not the same way,” she said. “It seems you get fixed on this one appearance of a person; I mean, this single idea you have.” She clicked her ballpoint pen. “And anyway, why leap ahead so? They haven’t all grown up. Molly and Kate are still in high school.”

  “No, no, they’re gone, for all intents and purposes,” Morgan said. “Out every evening, off somewhere, up to something … they’re gone, all right.” He brightened. “Aha!” he said. “Alone at last, my dollink!” But it called for too much effort. He drifted over to the stove, depressed, and lit a cigarette on a burner. “House feels so damn big, we needed a ride-’em vacuum cleaner.”

  “You always did want more closet space,” Bonny told him.

  “They’ve dumped their hamsters on us and gone away.”

  “Morgan. There were nine of us at dinner tonight, counting your mother and Brindle. When I was a little girl, any time there were nine at table we had to send downtown for Mattie Ida to come help serve.”

  “What we ought to do is move,” Morgan said. “We could get a house in the country, maybe live off the land.” He pictured himself in sabots and a rough blue peasant smock. The house would be a one-room cabin with a huge stone fireplace, a braided rug, and a daybed covered in some hand-woven fabric. Unbidden, Amy in her Dutch-cap curls bounced in the center of the daybed. He winced. “I’ll take an early retirement,” he said. “Forty-five feels older than I’d thought it would. I’ll retire and we’ll have some time to ourselves. Won’t that be nice?”

  “Now, don’t go off on one of your crazy schemes,” Bonny told him. “You’d die of boredom, retiring. You’d feel useless.”

  “Useless?” Morgan said. He frowned.

  But Bonny was on the track of something new, thoughtfully tapping her pen against her teeth. She said, “Morgan, in this day and age, do you believe the bride’s mother would still give the bride a little talk?”

  “Hmm?”

  “What I want to know is, am I expected to give Amy a talk about sex or am I not?”

  “Bonny, do you have to call it sex?”

  “What else would I call it?”

  “Well …”

  “I mean, sex is what it is, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but, I don’t know …”

  “I mean, what would you say? Is it sex, or isn’t it?”

  “Bonny, will you just stop hammering at me?”

  “Anyhow,” she said, returning to her list, “in this day and age, I bet she’d laugh in my face.”

  Morgan rubbed his forehead with two fingers. Really, it occurred to him, if Bonny had been more serious, more responsible, none of this upheaval would be happening. Or at least it wouldn’t be happening quite so soon. It seemed to him that she had let the children slip through her fingers in some sort of sloppy, casual, cheerful style that was uniquely hers. He recalled that once, while chaperoning Kate’s sixth-grade class on a field trip to Washington, she’d lost all eight of her charges in the Smithsonian Institution. They’d been found among showcases full of savages, copying down the recipe for shrunken heads. At the school’s annual mother-daughter picnic, where everyone else brought potato salad and lemonade, Bonny brought a sack of Big Macs and a Thermos of chablis. Yes, and she had such a disastrous effect upon machinery; she had only to settle behind the steering wheel and instantly the car fell apart. Warning lights would blink, steam would issue from the radiator, the muffler would drop off, and hubcaps would roll in every direction and clang along the gutters and slither down storm drains. She’d make one simple right turn and the turn signal would never work again. No wonder he spent half his weekends on his back in the garage! And she’d passed all this on to the girls too. The first driving lesson he gave Amy, the left front window had slid down inside the door and could not be retrieved. For that he’d had to go to the dealer.

  And then there was his sister, who hadn’t been out of that bathrobe of hers since Christmas. It hung on her like old orchid petals, wilted, striated, heavy-smelling. And his mother’s memory was failing more than ever now, though she flew into a fury if anyone hinted as much. At supper, proving her sharpness, she’d recite whole portions of “Hiawatha” or the Rubáiyát. “Come, fill the Cup …!” she’d start up out of nowhere, slamming a fork against her glass, and Brindle would say, “Oh, Jesus, not again,” and all the others would groan and fall into their separate, disorderly factions around the table.

  Useless? Living this life of his was such hard work that even if he retired tomorrow, he had no hope of feeling useless.

  2

  A my stood at the top of the stairs, wearing white and carrying roses. The hall window behind her lit her long, filmy skirt. At the bottom of the stairs Morgan waited with his hand on the newel post. He wore his new top hat and a pure-black suit from Second Chance. (There’d been a little fuss about the hat, but he’d held his ground.) He had trimmed his beard. Gold-rimmed spectacles (window glass) perched on his nose. He felt like Abraham Lincoln.

  One of Morgan’s failings was that formal, official proceedings—weddings, funerals—never truly affected him. They just didn’t seem to penetrate. He’d lain awake half of last night mourning his daughter, but the fact was that now, with the ceremony about to begin, all that was on his mind was Amy’s roses. He had distinctly heard the wedding-dress lady tell her to carry them low, at arm’s length—too low, even, she said, because if Amy were nervous at all she’d tend to lift them higher. And now, before the music had even started, Amy had her bouquet at breast level. This didn’t trouble Morgan (he couldn’t see that it made the slightest difference), but he wondered why nervousness should cause people to raise their arms. Was it something to do with protecting the heart? Morgan experimented. He clasped his hands first low, then high. He didn’t find the one any more comforting than the other. With his hands folded just beneath his beard, he tried a dipping rhythmic processional, humming to himself as he sashayed across the hall. “Daddy,” Amy hissed. Morgan dropped his hands and hurried back to the newel post.

  Kate set the needle on the record. The wedding march began in mid-note. In the living room the guests grew suddenly still; all Morgan heard was the creaking of their rented chairs. He smiled steadily up at Amy, his spectacles catching the light and flashing two white circles across her face. With her hand trailing down the banister, weightless as a leaf, Amy set a pointed satin slipper in the center of each step. Her skirt caused a clinking sound among the brass rods that anchored the Persian carpet. Yesterday morning Bonny had taken a red Magic Marker and colored in the bare spots in the carpet. Then she’d used a brown Magic Marker for the rips in the leather armchair. (Sometimes Morgan felt he was living in one of those crayoned paper houses that the twins used to make.) Amy reached the hallway and took his arm. She was trembling slightly. He guided her into the living room and down the makeshift aisle.

  On this same stringy rug he had walked her for hours when she was just newborn. He had nestled her head on his shoulder and paced the length of the rug and back, growling lullabies. The memory didn’t stir him. It was just there, just another, lower layer in this room that was full of layers. He led her up to Bonny’s minister, a man he disliked. (He disliked all ministers.) Amy dropped his arm and took a place next to what’s-his-name, Jim. Morgan stepped back and stood with his feet planted apart, his hands joined behind him. He rocked a little to the lullaby in his head.

  “Who gives this woman to be married?” the minister said. From the way the question rang in the silence, Morgan suspected it might have been asked once before without his noticing. He seemed to have missed part of the service. “Her mother and I do,” he said. It would have been more accurate to say, “Her mother does.” He turned and found his seat next to Bonny, who was looking beautif
ul and calm in a blue dress with a wide scoop neckline that kept slipping off one or the other of her shoulders. She laid a hand on top of his. Morgan noticed a gray thread of cobweb dangling from the ceiling.

  Jim put a ring on Amy’s finger. Amy put a ring on Jim’s finger. They kissed. Morgan thought of a plan: he would go live with them in their new apartment. They didn’t know a thing, not a thing. No doubt they’d have broken all their kitchen machines within a week and their household accounts would be a shambles, and then along would come Morgan to repair and advise. He would go as an old man, one of those really bereft old men with no teeth, no job, no wife, no family. In some small area he would act helpless, so that Amy would feel a need to care for him. He would arrive, perhaps, without buttons on his shirt, and would ask her to sew them on for him. He had no idea how to do it himself, he would tell her. Actually, Morgan was very good at sewing on buttons. Actually, he not only sewed on his own buttons but also Bonny’s and the girls’, and patched their jeans and altered their hemlines, since Bonny wasn’t much of a seamstress. Actually, Amy was aware of this. She was also aware that he was not a toothless old man and that he did have a wife and family. The trouble with fathering children was, they got to know you so well. You couldn’t make the faintest little realignment of the facts around them. They kept staring levelly into your eyes, eternally watchful and critical, forever prepared to pass judgment. They could point to so many places where you had gone permanently, irretrievably wrong.

  3

  There’d been a compromise on the food. Bonny had ordered several trays from the deli, and then Morgan had picked up some cheese and some crackers which the girls had put together this morning. He’d been upset to discover that there was apparently no discount outlet for gourmet cheeses. “Do you know what these things cost?” he asked the groom’s father, who had a hand poised over a cracker spread with something blue-veined. Then he wandered across the yard to check on the Camembert. It was surrounded by three young children—possibly Jim’s nephews. “This one smells like a stable,” the smallest was saying.

  “It smells like a gerbil cage.”

  “It smells like the … elephant house at the zoo!”

  The weather had turned out fine, after all. It was a warm, yellow-green day, and daffodils were blooming near the garage. A smiling brown maid, on loan from Uncle Ollie, bore a tray of drinks through the crowd, picking her way carefully around the muddy patches where the spring reseeding had not yet taken hold. The bride stood sipping champagne and listening to an elderly gentleman whom Morgan had never seen before. His other daughters—oddly plain in their dress-up clothes—passed around sandwiches and little things on toothpicks, and his mother was telling the groom’s mother why she lived on the third floor. “I started out on the second floor,” she said, “but moved on account of the goat.”

  “I see,” said Mrs. Murphy, patting her pearls.

  “This goat was housebroken, naturally, but the drawback was that I am the only person in this family who reads Time magazine. In fact, I have a subscription. And as coincidence would have it, the goat had only been trained on Time magazine. I mean, he would only … I mean, if the necessity arose, the only place he was willing to … was on a Time magazine spread on the floor. He recognized that red border, I suppose. And so you see if I were to lay my magazine aside even for a second, why, along this animal would come and just … would up and … would …”

  “He’d pee all over it,” Morgan said. “Tough luck if she wasn’t through reading it.”

  “Oh, yes,” Mrs. Murphy said. She took a sip from her glass.

  At Morgan’s elbow, in a splintered wicker chair, an unknown man sat facing in the other direction. Maybe he was from the groom’s side. He had a bald spot at the back of his head; fragile wisps of hair were drawn across it. He raised a drink to his lips. Morgan saw his weighty signet ring. “Billy?” Morgan said. He went around to the front of the chair. Good God, it was Billy, Bonny’s brother.

  “Nice wedding, Morgan,” Billy said. “I’ve been to a lot, you know—mostly my own. I’m an expert on weddings.” He laughed. His voice was matter-of-fact, but to Morgan it was the misplaced, eerie matter-of-factness sometimes encountered in dreams. How could this be Billy? What had happened here? Morgan had last seen Billy not a month ago. He said, “Billy, from the back of your head I didn’t know you.”

  “Really?” Billy said, unperturbed. “Well, how about from the front?”

  From the front he was the same as ever—boyish-looking, with a high, round forehead and dazzling blue eyes. But no, if you met him on the street somewhere, wouldn’t he be just another half-bald businessman? Only someone who’d known him as long as Morgan had could find the bones in his slackening face. Morgan stood blinking at him. Billy seemed first middle-aged and anonymous; then he was Bonny’s high-living baby brother; then he was middle-aged again—like one of those trick pictures that alter back and forth as you shift your position. “Well?” Billy said.

  “Have some champagne, why don’t you?” Morgan asked him.

  “No, thanks, I’ll stick to scotch.”

  “Have some cheese, then. It’s very expensive.”

  “Good old Morgan,” Billy said, toasting him. “Good old, cheap old Morgan, right?”

  Morgan wandered away again. He looked for someone else to talk to, but none of the guests seemed his type. They were all so genteel and well modulated, sipping their champagne, the ladies placing their high heels carefully to avoid sinking through the sod. In fact, who here was a friend of Morgan’s? He stopped and looked around him. Nobody was. They were Bonny’s friends, or Amy’s, or the groom’s. A twin flew by—Susan, in chiffon. Her flushed, earnest face and steamy spectacles reminded him that his daughters, at least, bore some connection to him. “Sue!” he cried.

  But she flung back, “I’m not Sue, I’m Carol.”

  Of course she was. He hadn’t made that mistake in years. He walked on, shaking his head. Under the dogwood tree, three uncles in gray suits were holding what appeared to be a committee meeting. “No, I’ve been letting my cellar go, these days,” one of them was saying. “Been drinking what I have on hand. To put it bluntly, I’m seventy-four years old. This June I’ll be seventy-five. A while back I was pricing a case of wine and they recommended that I age it eight years. ‘Good enough,’ I started to say. Then I thought, ‘Well, no.’ It was the strangest feeling. It was the oddest moment. I said, ‘No, I suppose it’s not for me. Thanks anyway.’ ”

  At a gap in the hedge, Morgan slipped through. He found himself on the sidewalk, next to the brisk, noisy street, on a normal Saturday afternoon. His car was parked alongside the curb. He opened the door and climbed in. For a while he just sat there, rubbing his damp palms on the knees of his trousers. But the sun through the glass was baking him, and finally he rolled down a window, dug through his pockets for the keys, and started the engine.

  These were his closest friends: Potter the musical-instrument man, the hot-dog lady, the Greek tavern-keeper on Broadway, and Kazari the rug merchant. None of them would do. For one reason or another, there wasn’t a single person he could tell, “My oldest daughter’s getting married. Could I sit here with you and smoke a cigarette?”

  He floated farther and farther downtown, as if descending through darkening levels of water. All’s Fair Pawnshop, Billiards, Waterbeds, Beer, First House of Jesus, SOUL BROTHER DO NOT BURN. Flowers were blooming in unlikely places—around a city trashcan and in the tiny, parched weed-patch beneath a rowhouse window. He turned a corner where a man sat on the curb flicking out the blade of his knife, slamming it shut with the heel of his hand, and flicking it out again. He traveled on. He passed Meller Street, then Merger Street. He turned down Crosswell. He parked and switched the engine off and sat looking at Crafts Unlimited.

  It was months since he’d been here. The shop window was filled with Easter items now—hand-decorated eggs and stuffed rabbits, a patchwork quilt like an early spring garden. The Merediths’ win
dows were empty, as always; you couldn’t tell a thing from them. Maybe they’d moved. (They could move in a taxi, with one suitcase, after ten minutes’ preparation.) He slid out of the car and walked toward the shop. He climbed the steps, pushed through the glass door, and gazed up the narrow staircase. But he didn’t have what it took to continue. (What would he say? How would he explain himself?) Instead, he turned left, through a second glass door and into the crafts shop. It smelled of raw wood. A gray-haired, square-boned woman in a calico smock was arranging hand-carved animals on a table. “Hello,” she said, and then she glanced up and gave him a startled look. It was the top hat, he supposed. He wished he’d worn something more appropriate. And why were there no other customers? He was all alone, conspicuous, in a roomful of quilted silence. Then he saw the puppets. “Ah, so!” he said. “Ze poppets!” Surprisingly, he seemed to have developed an accent—from what country, he couldn’t say. “Zese poppets are for buying?” he asked.

  “Why, yes,” the woman said.

  They lay on a center table: Pinocchio, a princess, a dwarf, an old lady, all far more intricate than the first ones he’d seen. Their heads were no longer round, simple, rubber-ball heads but were constructed of some padded cloth, with tiny stitches making wrinkles and bulges. The old-lady puppet, in particular, had a face so furrowed that he couldn’t help running his finger across it. “Wonderful!” he said, still in his accent.

  “They’re sewn by a girl named Emily Meredith,” the woman told him. “A remarkable craftsman, really.”

  Morgan nodded. He felt a mixture of jealousy and happiness. “Yes, yes,” he wanted to say, “don’t I know her very well? Don’t I know both of them? Who are you, to speak of them?” But also he wanted to hear how this woman saw them, what the rest of the world had to say about them. He waited, still holding the puppet. The woman turned back to her animals.

  “Perhaps I see her workroom,” he said.