by Anne Tyler
They’d finished with the balance beam and moved in the horse for vaulting. Morgan thought vaulting was a monotonous event to watch. He tucked his boot in off the floor so the girls could run past him, one by one, for two leaps each. Their arms and legs looked stretched with concentration, and their faces were comically intense. Gina raced by with her eyes tightly focused. She sprang up and cleared the horse, but then she did something wrong. Instead of landing upright, she fell in a twisted heap on the mat.
The mothers went rigid; one laid her needlepoint aside. Morgan leaped to his feet. He was certain Gina’d broken her neck. But no, she was all right, or nearly all right—in tears, but not seriously injured. She rose holding on to one wrist. A young woman in shorts, with a whistle dangling from her neck, bent over her to ask her questions. Gina answered inaudibly, blotting her tears on her sleeve.
The woman led her up the floor again for her second try, though Gina was shaking her head and sobbing. The woman was saying something in a coaxing, reasoning voice. She smoothed Gina’s hair, speaking urgently. It was barbaric. Morgan hated sports. He sat down and put an unlit cigarette in his mouth with a trembling hand.
Gina shrugged the woman away, drew herself up, and narrowed her eyes at the horse. There was still a little catch in her breath. It was the loudest sound in the gym. Everyone leaned forward. Gina set her jaw and started running. By the time she passed Morgan she was a steely, pounding blur. She cleared the horse magnificently and landed in perfect form, with her arms raised high.
Morgan jumped up and flung away his cigarette. He galloped in her footsteps all the way to the horse, and veered around it to hug her. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. “Sweetheart, you were wonderful,” he said. She said, “Oh, Morgan,” and giggled. (She was unscathed; she had forgotten everything.) She slipped away from him to join her teammates. Morgan returned to his seat, beaming and wiping his eyes. “Wasn’t she wonderful,” he told the mothers. He blew his nose in his handkerchief. He felt suddenly joyous and expansive. What could he not accomplish? He was a wide, deep, powerful man, and it was time he took some action.
5
“How was the meet?” Emily asked Gina.
“It was all right.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be there. Morgan, do you want to come in?”
“Yes, thank you,” Morgan said. Emily’s appearance shocked him. Four days ago—the last time he’d seen her—she’d been a little drawn, yes, but now her skin had the yellow, cracked look of aged chinaware. “Emily, dear,” he said. Emily slid her eyes sideways, reminding him of Gina, but he ignored her. He didn’t even glance around for Leon, who might very well have returned by now. “I’ve come to take you to a doctor,” he said.
“Is Mama really sick?” Gina asked.
“She needs a check-up. You stay here, Gina. We won’t be long.”
He started hunting through the closet for a sweater or a jacket, something light, but all he found was Emily’s winter coat. He took it off the hanger and helped her into it. She stood docilely while he buttoned the buttons.
“It’s not that cold,” Gina told him.
“We have to take good care of her.”
He led Emily out the door, closing it behind him. Halfway down the stairs, he heard the door swing open again. Gina hung over the banister. “Can I have that last banana?” she asked her mother.
Morgan said, “Yes. For God’s sake. Anything you like.” Emily was silent. Like someone truly ill, she made her way falteringly down the stairs.
In the truck she said, “Do we have an appointment?”
“We’ll make one when we get there.”
“Morgan, it takes weeks.”
“Not today it won’t,” he said, pulling out of the parking space.
He drove to St. Paul Street, to Bonny’s old obstetrician. He couldn’t remember the number, but recalled very clearly the upholsterer’s establishment next to it, and when he found a display window full of dusty velvet furniture, he stopped immediately, blocking an alley, and assisted Emily from the truck.
“How do you know this person?” Emily asked, looking around her at the gaunt, grimy buildings.
“He delivered all my daughters.”
“Morgan!”
“What?”
“We can’t go in there.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“He knows you! I mean, we have to find someone else. We have to assume an alias or something.”
Morgan took her elbow and guided her up the front steps, through the brass-trimmed door, and into a carpeted lobby. “Never mind all that,” he told her, punching a button for the elevator. “This is no time to play around, Emily.”
The elevator door slid open. A very old black man in a purple and gold uniform was sitting on a stool in the corner. Morgan hadn’t realized that elevator men still existed. “Three,” he said. He stepped in beside Emily. The silence in which they rode was dense and charged. Emily kept twisting her top button.
In the waiting room Morgan told the receptionist, “Morgan Gower. Emergency.”
The receptionist looked at Emily.
“We have to see Dr. Fogarty right away,” Morgan said.
“Doctor is booked solid. Would you care to make an appointment?”
“It’s an emergency, I tell you.”
“What seems to be the trouble?”
“I’ll discuss the trouble when I see Fogarty.”
“Dr. Fogarty is very busy, sir. Perhaps if you leave a number where he can call when he’s through with his patients—”
Morgan stepped past her, around her desk, and through the oak door behind her. Often, biding his time in various waiting rooms, he had imagined doing this, but he had always assumed it would be necessary to wrestle the receptionist to the floor first. In fact the receptionist was a tiny, mousy girl with limp hair, and she didn’t even stand up when he came through. He barreled down a short white corridor, into a room full of instruments, out again, and into another room. There an older, grayer Dr. Fogarty was seated behind a kidney-shaped desk, placing his fingertips neatly together, holding a discussion with a very young couple. The couple looked bashful and pleased. The girl was leaning forward, about to ask some earnest question. Rushed though he was, Morgan had time for a little spasm of pity. How shallow they seemed! Probably they thought this was the most significant moment in history. “Pardon me,” Morgan told them. “I hate to interrupt this way.”
“Mr. Gower,” the doctor said, unsurprised.
“Ah! You remember me.”
“How could one forget?”
“This is an emergency,” Morgan said.
Dr. Fogarty let his chair rock forward at last, and parted his fingertips. “Is something wrong with Bonny?” he asked.
“No, no, it’s Emily, someone else. This is Emily.” He should have brought her in with him. What could he have been thinking of? He grabbed a hank of his hair. “It’s terribly important. She’s going to pieces, believes she’s pregnant … Fogarty, if she’s right, we need to know it now, this instant, not at two-fifteen next Tuesday or Wednesday or Friday.”
“Mr. Gower, honestly,” the doctor said. He sighed. “Why you have to take every stage of your life so much more to heart than ordinary people—”
Immediately, Morgan felt reassured. So this was merely a stage, then! He turned to the couple and said, “I beg your pardon. Have I told you that? I’m sorry to seem so rude.” The couple stared at him with blank, unformed faces.
“Show her into the room next door,” the doctor said. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
“Oh, thank you, Fogarty,” Morgan said.
He felt a rush of affection for the man—his benign expression and his puffy gray mustache. It must be wonderful to view events so matter-of-factly. Maybe Morgan ought to shave his beard off and wear only a mustache. He stumbled out of the office, tentatively fingering his whiskers. He went back to the waiting room, where Emily was sitting alert, ready to fly, on a loveseat next to
a pear-shaped woman in a smock. The receptionist didn’t even glance at him. (Maybe this happened every day.) He beckoned to Emily, and she rose and came toward him. He led her to the room beside the doctor’s office, the one that was full of equipment, and he helped her take her coat off. There was no place to hang it. He folded it into a wrinkled, oval bundle and set it on an enameled cabinet. “Didn’t I tell you?” he asked Emily. “Everything will be all right. I’ll take care of you, sweetheart.”
Emily stood looking at him.
“Sit down,” he told her. He steered her toward the examining table. She sat gingerly on the foot of it, smoothing her skirt around her.
Then Morgan started circling the room. All the instruments struck him as gruesome—tongs and pincers. What a world of innards women lived in! He shook his head. In one corner he found a hospital scale. The last person to stand on it had weighed a hundred and eighty-two pounds. “Mercy,” he said disapprovingly. He slid the weights to the left. They felt solid and authoritative. “Ahem, young lady,” he told Emily, “if you’ll just hop on our scales, please …”
“I should have called a clinic. Family Planning or something,” Emily said, as if to herself. “I meant to, every day, but I don’t know, lately it seems I’ve got locked in place, frozen.”
“Would you like a johnny coat?” Morgan asked, rooting through the cabinet. “Look here, they’re pink. Just slip into our Schiaparelli johnny coat, Miss …”
Emily didn’t respond. She was holding herself tense, with her hands clasped tightly in her lap.
Morgan went over and touched her arm. “Emily. Don’t worry,” he said. “This will all work out. Emily? Am I getting on your nerves? Do you want me to leave? Yes, I’ll go outside and wait for you, that’s a good idea … Emily, don’t feel bad.”
She still didn’t answer.
He left and went to sit in the waiting room. He chose a chair in the corner, as far as possible from the pear-shaped woman. Even so, she seemed to be pressing in on him. She gave off a swelling, insistent warmth, although she pretended not to and seemed immersed in a Baby Talk magazine. Morgan let his head drop and covered his eyes with his fingers. Everything was a bluff. He knew the truth by now, however long it might take Fogarty to prove it scientifically. This was it. This was it.
He was done for.
The woman flipped the pages of her magazine, and car horns honked in the distance, and the telephone rang with a muted, purring sound. Morgan raised his head and stared at the oak door. He began to see the situation from another angle. An assignment had been given him. Someone’s life, a small set of lives, had been placed in the palm of his hand. Maybe he would never have any more purpose than this: to accept the assignment gracefully, lovingly, and do the best he could with it.
6
On Wednesday morning, after Emily heard from the doctor, Morgan came home from work to tell Bonny. Bonny had launched one of her spring-cleaning attacks that always made the house seem untidier than before. Morgan could smell the dust flying the minute he walked in. She was in the dining room, wearing a kerchief over her hair, washing down her ancestors’ portraits with Spic and Span. Various scowling gentlemen in nineteenth-century frockcoats leaned against the chairs. Bonny was not intimidated. She scrubbed their faces with the same brisk energy she had once shown in scrubbing her children. Morgan stood in the doorway watching.
She wrung out a sponge, wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist, and then looked over at him. “Morgan? What is it?” she asked.
He said, “Emily’s pregnant.”
In the second it took her to absorb it, he saw he had worded it wrong. She could easily misunderstand. She might say, “Why, isn’t that nice! They must be thrilled.” But no, she understood, all right. Her mouth dropped open. She took on a white, opaque look. She reared back and threw the sponge at him. It skimmed his cheekbone, wet and warm and rough like something alive. Partly, he was impressed. (What a woman! Direct as some kind of electrical charge—undiffused.) But he had never been able to tolerate being hit in the face. He felt bitterly, gloriously angry, and free. He turned and walked out of the house.
At the hardware store he pushed past Butkins and went to use the phone. “Emily? Can you talk?” he asked.
“Yes, Leon’s loading the car.”
“Well, I told her,” he said.
“What’d she say?”
“Nothing, in fact.”
“Was she very angry?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know,” he said. “Emily, have you talked to Leon?”
“No. I’m going to.”
“When?”
“Soon,” she said. “Right now we’ve got a show at the library. I have to wait till after it’s done.”
“Well, I don’t know why,” Morgan said.
“Maybe I could tell him tonight.”
“Tonight? Sweetheart, you’d better get this over with,” he said.
“It’s just … you know, just a matter of finding the proper moment.”
After he had hung up, Morgan had a sudden fear that she would never tell Leon. He pictured having to sleep on the couch in his office forever—a man unkempt, uncared for. Like someone who had fallen between two stepping stones in a river, he’d let go of Bonny without yet being certain of Emily. He could not imagine life as a bachelor.
He sat a while drumming his fingers on his desk. He had an urge to write letters. But whom would he write to? He wondered how he could get hold of his cardboard file box. Surely Bonny wouldn’t do anything rash with it, would she?—burn it? set it out for the trashmen? She knew how much it meant to him.
Finally he rose and went downstairs. Butkins was outdoors, helping a customer. In the spring they put some of their merchandise on the sidewalk—flats of seedlings, giant bags of mulch and fertilizer. Morgan peered through the window and saw Butkins tenderly fitting a marigold plant into a brown paper bag. He turned away and went into the stockroom. There were cartons of garden tools here, waiting to be unpacked. He opened one and pulled out trowels, dozens of them, which he heaped on the floor. He opened others and pulled out hedge trimmers, then cultivators, then shiny-toothed wheels for edging lawns. The stockroom became a tangle of chrome blades and painted wooden handles.
Butkins came in and said, “Um …”
Morgan surveyed all he had unpacked. Then he pried up another flap and reached for a pair of grass shears in a cardboard sheath.
Butkins said, “Mr. Gower, there’s some things of yours on the sidewalk.”
“Things?”
“It looks like … belongings. Clothing. Also a dog.”
“How’d they get there?”
“Mrs. Gower, ah, dumped them there.”
Morgan straightened up and followed Butkins through the store and out onto the sidewalk, which was a sea of hats and clothes. An elderly woman with a cane was trying on a pith helmet. Harry, who had never been much of a watchdog, was smiling at her with his tongue hanging out. He was sitting on Morgan’s red-and-white-striped, ’twas-the-night-before-Christmas nightshirt. “I’m sorry, Mr. Gower, I didn’t know what to do,” Butkins said. “It happened so fast. She threw them, like. Knocked over half the seedlings.”
“Yes, but why the dog?” Morgan asked.
“Pardon me?”
“The dog, the dog. It’s not my dog; it’s my mother’s. I never even liked him. He dribbles. Why did she send me the dog?”
“Well, and there’s some articles of clothing here too, you see.”
“It isn’t fair. I don’t want a dog.”
“There’s hats and nightwear.”
“Come back here!” Morgan told the old lady. She was making off with his pith helmet. She wore it tipped too far forward—had no idea of the proper angle. “Come back with my helmet!” he cried. She walked faster and faster, as if on little wheels. Considering her age and her cane, Morgan had to marvel.
“Shall I go after her?” Butkins asked.
“No, help me bring in the rest of the things. P
eople will be all over them,” Morgan said. Butkins stooped for an armload of clothing, but stopped when Morgan told him, “She won’t even know to dampen it, I’ll bet.”
“Pardon?”
“You dampen the helmet in hot weather. It cools your head by the process of evaporation.”
“Shall I go after her, then?”
“No, no.”
“Are these boots yours too?”
“Everything,” said Morgan. He scooped up an armload of hats and followed Butkins inside. “Actually, I don’t think she brought nearly my whole wardrobe, though. Where’s my gnome hat? Where’s my sombrero?”
“Are you and Mrs. Gower experiencing some difficulty?” Butkins said.
“Not at all. Why do you ask?” said Morgan. He went outside for another armload, chasing away two small boys who were interested in a sheepskin vest. “Come in, Harry,” he told the dog. “Butkins, we’ll need those cartons from the stockroom.”
They made a total of six trips. Bonny had not, in fact, forgotten anything. Morgan found his file box under a cloak. He found his gnome hat and sombrero, and also a Napoleonic tricorne he’d forgotten all about. He blew the dust off and tried it on. He checked his reflection in the nickel surface of the cash register. Under the cocked brim his bearded face peered out hollowly. He was sickened. What a farce! How ridiculous! He had always, even in infancy, been a fool for hats. As a child, he’d worn firemen’s helmets and Indian headdresses to bed at night. This was no better. He tore the tricorne off and flung it on the floor.
“Oh!” said Butkins. “It’s an antique.”
“I hate it.”
