Morgan's Passing

by Anne Tyler

“I wanted to hear the news,” he said.

  It wasn’t true; he never felt the news had anything to do with him. What he’d wanted was to drown out the sound of the ocean. This was Tuesday. They’d been here three days. There were eleven days remaining. He sighed and sat on the edge of the bed to pull his socks on. “I’ll bring breakfast from the bakery,” he told Bonny. “Anything you want while I’m in town?”

  “The bakery’s not open yet.”

  “I’ll go and wait. I’ll buy a paper. It’s too quiet here.”

  “Well, bring some of those bow-tie things with cherries, then …” She yawned and ruffled her hair. A pillow mark ran down her left cheek. “Lucky you,” she said. “You fell asleep right away, last night.”

  “I had a terrible sleep.”

  “You fell asleep instantly.”

  “But the whole night long I dreamed,” Morgan said, “and woke, and checked the clock. I can’t remember now what I dreamed. A man in a tailcoat stepped out of the wardrobe. I think this house is haunted, Bonny.”

  “You say that every year,” Bonny told him.

  “Well, it’s haunted every year.” He pulled a striped T-shirt over his head. When he emerged, he said, “All these wakeful nights, peculiar thoughts … the most I hope for, from a vacation, is a chance to rest up once it’s over.”

  “Today’s the day my brother comes,” Bonny said, climbing out of bed.

  Morgan zipped his hiking shorts, which were new and full of pockets and flaps that he hadn’t yet explored. Attached to one pocket was a metal clasp. It was probably meant for a compass. “I don’t suppose you brought along a compass,” he told Bonny.

  “Compass?”

  He glanced at her. She was standing before the wardrobe in a short, plain nightgown that he happened to be fond of. He was even fond of the grapy veins in her calves, and her rumpled knees. He considered slipping up to kiss the pulse in her throat, but then he felt laden by the heat and the waves and the tongue-and-groove walls. “Ah, God. I have to do something about this life of mine,” he said.

  “What about it?” she asked, sliding a blouse off a hanger.

  “It’s come to nothing. It’s come to nothing.”

  She looked over at him, and parted her lips as if about to ask a question. But then he said, “Bow-tie pastries, right? With cherries.”

  He was gone before she could ask whatever it was she had planned.

  2

  With one hand under his mother’s elbow, he steered her along the boardwalk. It was nearly noon, and she wore a great black cartwheel of a hat to guard against sunburn. Her striped terry beach robe was long-sleeved and ankle-length, and it concealed not a bathing suit but an ordinary street dress, for she could no more swim than fly, she always said. Her face was pale and pursed, even in this heat, and her fingertips were cold when she touched his arm. She touched his arm to tell him to stop for a second. She wanted to look at a house that was under construction. “What an unusual shape,” she said.

  “It’s called an A-frame,” Morgan said.

  “Why, it’s practically all garret.”

  Morgan summoned his thoughts together. At moments like this, when Louisa seemed fully in touch with her surroundings, he always made an effort to have a real conversation with her. “The cost,” he said, “is considerably lower than for other houses, I believe.”

  “Yes, I should think so,” she said. She patted his arm again, and they walked on. She said, “Let’s see now. How long have we been here?”

  “Three days, Mother.”

  “Eleven more to go,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She said, “Heavens.”

  “Maybe our family wasn’t cut out for vacations,” Morgan said. “Maybe not.”

  “It must be the work ethic,” he said.

  “Well, I don’t know what that is. It’s more like we vacation all year round on our own.”

  “How can you say that?” Morgan asked. “What about my hardware store?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “We’re city people,” Morgan said. “We have our city patterns, things to keep us busy … It’s dangerous, lolling around like this. It’s never good just to loll around and think. Why, you and Father never vacationed in your lives. Did you?”

  “I don’t recall,” she said.

  She would not remember anything about his father, ever. Sometimes Morgan wondered if her failing memory for recent events might stem from her failing memory of her husband; selective forgetfulness was an impossibility, maybe. Having chosen to forget in one area, she had to forget in all others as well. He felt a sudden urge to jolt her. He wanted to ask: am I aging in the same direction my father did? have I journeyed too far from him? am I too near? what do I have to go on, here? I’m traveling blind; I’m older now than my own father ever lived to be. Instead, he asked, “Didn’t you and he go to Ocean City once?”

  “I really wouldn’t know,” she said primly.

  “Jesus! You’re so stubborn!” he shouted, slapping his thigh. His mother remained unmoved, but two girls walking ahead in bikinis looked over their shoulders at him. “Do you ever think how I must feel?” he asked his mother. “Sometimes I feel I’ve just been plunked here. I have no one from the old days; I’m just a foreigner on my own. You can’t count Brindle; she’s so much younger, and anyway so wrapped up in that husband of hers …”

  “But there’s always me,” his mother said, picking her way around a toddler with a bucket.

  “Yes,” he said, “but often you sort of … vacate, Mother; you’re not really there at all.”

  He had hurt her feelings. He was glad of it only for an instant; then he felt deeply remorseful. His mother raised her head high and looked off toward someone’s A-frame cottage, where beach towels flapped on the balcony railing. “Why!” she said. “Wasn’t that speedy.”

  “What was, Mother dear?”

  “They’ve finished construction on the A-frame,” she said. “It seems like no time at all.” And she jutted her chin at him with a triumphant, bitter glare.

  “So it does, dear heart,” he said.

  3

  Morgan went out to get a pizza for their supper and returned to find that Bonny’s brother had arrived. He’d brought his new wife, Priscilla, a pretty girl with short, straight blond hair caught back in a silver barrette. They had been married only a few weeks. They wore similar crisp, new-looking white slacks and pastel shirts, like honeymooners. Morgan hadn’t even met Priscilla up till now—or people seemed to assume he hadn’t, for Billy introduced her and she shook Morgan’s hand formally. Bonny said, “Priscilla went to Roland Park Country School with the Semple-Pearce girls, Morgan.”

  “Oh, yes,” Morgan said, but the truth of the matter was, he could have sworn that Billy had been married to Priscilla once before. He seemed to remember her. He thought she might even have visited this cottage. But she acted as if everything were new to her. “What a sweet place,” she said. “What a lot of … character,” and she walked around the living room fingering the seashell ashtrays like a stranger, and peering at the photograph of Uncle Ollie’s 1934 lacrosse team, and reading all the titles on the Reader’s Digest book condensations. Morgan was cagy; he went along with it. Then as soon as possible he cornered Bonny, who had taken the pizza out to the kitchen.

  “Bonny,” he whispered, “isn’t that girl an ex-wife of his?”

  “No, dear, she’s his present wife.”

  “But didn’t Billy marry her another time, earlier?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I know he did,” he said. “He married her and brought her here; it was the same time of year.”

  Bonny straightened up from the oven. She looked hot; the hair around her temples was damp. She said, “Morgan, I am not in the mood for any of your jabs at my brother.”

  “Jabs? What jabs?”

  “Just because he may have a fondness for one particular type of girl—” Bonny said.

  “I’m
not talking types, Bonny. I mean this. He brought her here several years ago and she had that little dog Kelty, Kilty, … why deny it? There’s nothing wrong with marrying her twice. Lots of people go back, retrace, try to get it right the second time around. Why cover it up?”

  She only sighed and returned to the living room. Morgan followed her. He found Billy and Priscilla on the wicker couch, talking with Morgan’s mother. Billy looked old and foolish in his vivid clothes, with his bald pink skull, his pale hair straggling behind his ears. He had hold of one of Priscilla’s hands and was stroking it, like something trapped, in his lap. Priscilla was pretending the hand did not belong to her. She leaned forward earnestly, listening to Louisa discuss the drive to Bethany. “I took along a thermos of Lipton tea,” Louisa said, “and two nice, juicy nectarines, and a box of arrowroot biscuits that Bonny sometimes buys for my digestion.” Priscilla nodded, her face alight with interest and enthusiasm. She was very young. She couldn’t possibly have been married several years ago; several years ago she would still have been a schoolgirl in a royal-blue Roland Park Country School jumper. Morgan felt confused. He sat down in a rocking chair.

  Louisa said, “Traffic was held up on the Bridge, so we stopped and I got out and sat in the grass by the side of the road. There was a little boy there, just a tot, and I shared one of my nectarines with him and he gave me a nice speckle pear.”

  “Seckel pear,” Morgan murmured. He could not bear to have her laughed at.

  “A speckle pear, this one was. I finished half of it and put the other half in a Baggie. Then we got back in the car and drove across the Bridge, but in Delaware we stopped again where the Kiwanis Club was barbecuing chickens and I had half a chicken, a Tab, and a sack of potato chips. They were out of bread-and-butter pickles. At Farmer John’s Vegetable Stand …”

  Priscilla’s purse was one of those button-on things with a wooden handle. Bermuda bags, he believed they were called. You could button on an infinity of different covers to match different outfits. He would bet that her suitcase was full of covers—seersucker pink, yachting blue … he lost his train of thought. He wondered what had possessed him to leave his camera at home, hanging by its leather strap in the downstairs closet. For the first time in twenty years he would not have pictures of their vacation. On the other hand, what was the use of such pictures? They were only the same, year after year. Same waves, same sunburns, same determined smiles …

  “After we reached Bethany, I started feeling a little peckish, so I walked to the market with Kate and picked out a watermelon. It was a wonderful melon, really fat and thumpy-sounding, and once we got it back to the cottage all we had to do was touch a knife point to it and it crackled all the way open. But it had no taste. Can you believe it? Had no taste whatsoever. Such a lovely color and not a scrap of taste. I just don’t understand that,” Morgan’s mother said.

  Morgan suddenly remembered another of last night’s dreams. He’d been standing on a lawn beside a beautiful, graceful woman he’d never seen before. She led him toward a child’s swing hanging from a tree limb. They settled on it—the woman sitting, Morgan standing, enclosing her with his feet. They started swinging over a cliff. Tiny yellow flowers dotted a field far below them. Morgan knew that when they were swinging high enough, they would leap. He would die. He wasn’t upset about it. Then the woman tipped her head back against him, and he felt the length of her between his legs—the curve of her ribcage, the satiny coolness of her clothing. He was like a boy again, trembling. He saw that as long as he felt this way, he wanted to go on living, and all at once he was afraid of the leap. He woke abruptly, with his heart beating so hard that his whole body seemed to vibrate.

  4

  In the past few years Morgan had become a letter-writer. He couldn’t have said exactly why. It just seemed, sometimes, that he grew restless and ill-contained; he couldn’t sit still; there was something he wanted to tell someone, but he couldn’t think what it was and he had no particular person in mind. Then he would sit down and write letters—although even that was not quite it; it was only second best. At work, he used his Woodstock typewriter, which produced an uneven, sooty print that danced all over the page. He plodded away with two index fingers, stopping after every word or so to pry up the A key, which wouldn’t spring back on its own. At home, he wrote with a leaky fountain pen whose cartridge he refilled with a plastic hypodermic needle. (He’d salvaged the needle from an emergency-room wastebasket during one of the children’s accidents. Buying cartridges already filled was an extravagance, he felt.) He wrote all his daughters, even those still living in Baltimore. He wrote the traveling salesmen who came to the store, and his friends Kazari and the Greek tavern-keeper. Because he did not often have anything to say, he gave advice, as a rule. It has come to my attention that your company’s plant-sprayer bottles work exceedingly well for dousing fireplace logs at bedtime. Simply fill the bottle with water, adjust the nozzle to setting 4 …

  * * *

  Or:

  Dear Amy,

  I notice that you appear to be experiencing some difficulty with household clutter.

  Understand that I’m not blaming you for this, your mother has the same problem. But as I’ve been telling her for years, there is a solution.

  Simply take a cardboard box, carry it through the rooms, load into it everyone’s toys and dirty clothes and such, and hide it all in a closet. If people ask for some missing object, you’ll be able to tell them where it is. If they don’t ask (now, here is the important part), if a week goes by and they don’t notice the object is gone, then you can be sure it’s non-essential, and you throw it away. You would be surprised at how many things are non-essential. Throw everything away, all of it! Simplify! Don’t hesitate!

  All my love, sweetheart,

  Daddy

  That night, after the others had gone to bed, Morgan sat at the kitchen table and wrote a postcard to Potter, the musical-instrument man … weather has been fair and warm, a high in the 80’s all three days … must thank the good Lord for in Rehoboth I hear they had 1¾ inches of rainfall in 47 minutes … Yours in Christ, Gower Morgan, S.J. He wrote Todd, his three-year-old grandson, a fine, masculine letter: The new pickup is doing well and the baggage space comes in handy, believe me. Was able to take our entire set of Encyclopedia Britannica to the beach. Now have 15,010 miles on the odometer with the fuel cost per mile being 2.1¢ and total operating costs per mile being 4.76¢. If you assume a 30% depreciation each year …

  He addressed the letter to Todd and laid it on top of Potter’s postcard. He sat there blankly for a moment. Then he reached for another sheet of paper. Dear Emily, Leon, and Gina, he wrote. Have been having pleasant weather and temperatures in the 80’s …

  But it never helped to write the same things over. He crossed the sentence out and wrote, Why not come Friday for the weekend? Simply take the Bay Bridge and continue to Wye Mills, switching there to Highway 404 and then to Highway 18 …

  5

  Late Thursday morning Brindle showed up. No one had expected her. Morgan was on the front porch, slouching in a painted rocker and leafing through a volume of the encyclopedia. He happened to glance toward the street and there, just coming to a halt, was the little red sports car that Robert Roberts had given Brindle on their wedding day. Brindle yanked the emergency brake and got out, streaming tears. Her head was swathed in the white chiffon scarf she always slept in to calm her hair down, and she wore some kind of oversized, ankle-length white coat. In fact, she reminded Morgan of an early automobile driver. “Oh, I like that very much,” he told her as she climbed the porch steps. “The veil, the duster …”

  “It’s not a duster, it’s a bathrobe,” Brindle said. She blew her nose in a soggy-looking Kleenex. Crying had turned her soft and full, almost pretty. Her eyelids were shiny and her sallow skin had a faint pink glow. She sank into the chair next to Morgan’s and folded her Kleenex to a dry spot. “I got it last week at Stewart’s,” she said. “Sixteen forty-nin
e, marked down from thirty-two ninety-eight.”

  “Half-price; not bad at all,” said Morgan. “Here, dear, have a cigarette.”

  “I don’t smoke,” she told him.

  “Have one, sweetheart. It’ll do you good.”

  He extended the pack and shook it invitingly, but she only blotted her eyes. “I can’t stand it any more,” she said. “I must have been out of my mind, marrying that … tree, that boulder; all he does is sit there mourning. I can’t stand it.”

  “Have a Rolaid. Have a coughdrop. Have some Wrigley’s spearmint gum,” Morgan said. He tore through his pockets.

  “He keeps my graduation photo on the television set. Half the time that he pretends he’s watching TV, he’s really watching my photo. I see him clicking his eyes back in focus when I walk into the room. When he thinks I’m busy with something else, he’ll go over to the photo and pick it up and study it. Then he’ll shake his head and set it down again.”

  Her face fell apart and she started sobbing. Morgan gazed off toward the street. He wasn’t exactly humming, but he went, “Mm-mm, mm-mm,” from time to time, and drummed his fingers on his open book. A little boy rode by on a bicycle, tinkling a bell. Two ladies in skirted swimsuits carried a basketful of laundry between them.

  “Of course, every situation has its difficult moments,” Morgan said. He cleared his throat.

  Then Bonny came out on the porch. “Brindle!” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Bonny, I just can’t stand it any more,” Brindle said.

  She reached out her arms, and Bonny came over to hug her and tell her, “There now, Brindle, never mind.” (She always knew better than Morgan what to say.) “Never you mind, now, Brindle.”

  “It’s getting so I’m jealous of my own self,” Brindle said, muffled. “I’m jealous of my photograph, and the silver-plated ID bracelet I gave him when I was thirteen. He never takes that bracelet off. He sleeps with it; he bathes with it. ‘Let it go,’ I feel like saying. ‘Can’t you ever forget her?’ He sits in that TV room staring at my photo … there’s times I’ve even seen tears in his eyes. I say, ‘Robert, talk to me, please,’ and he says, ‘Yes, yes, in a minute.’ ”