Morgan's Passing

by Anne Tyler

  “Brindle’s snoring.”

  “Don’t you want to save your new clothes till later in the day? You’ll get them dirty before Daddy sees them.”

  “He said he was starting out at crack of dawn.”

  “Oh.”

  Emily looked at the kitchen clock. She wiped Joshua’s mouth with a corner of his bib, scooped him up, and carried him off to his bath.

  When she brought him back to the bedroom, dripping wet, Morgan was standing in front of a bureau threading a belt through his jeans. He was humming a polka. Then he stopped. Emily looked up from toweling the baby and found Morgan watching her in the mirror, his eyes darkened and sobered by a black felt cowboy hat. “What’s wrong?” she asked him.

  “Should I go?”

  “Go where?”

  “When he comes, I mean. Do you want me to leave you two alone?”

  “No. Please. I need you to stay,” she said.

  Morgan saw Bonny all the time. Any dull moment Bonny had, it seemed, she would come unload something new on them—some belonging of Brindle’s or Louisa’s, some piece of furniture she’d suddenly decided was really more Morgan’s than hers. But Emily hadn’t seen Leon since the day he moved out. Even at Christmas she’d just put Gina on a Greyhound bus.

  Morgan came over to stand opposite her. Lately, he had started wearing rimless, octagonal spectacles—real ones, not mere window glass. They gave him an expression of kindness and patience. He said, “I’ll do whatever you want, Emily.”

  “I have to have you here. I can’t go through it without you.”

  “All right.”

  His calm unnerved her.

  “Not that this means anything to me,” she said. “His coming: I don’t care.”

  “No.”

  “It couldn’t matter less.”

  “I understand.”

  He went back to the bureau and slipped his cigarettes into his pocket. On the bed Joshua flapped his arms and suddenly crowed.

  Louisa and Brindle were having breakfast in the kitchen while Emily did the dishes. Louisa chewed her toast in a mincing way. Brindle sat with her chin in her fist and stirred her coffee aimlessly. “Last night I dreamed of Horace,” she told Emily. Horace was her first husband. “He said, ‘Brindle, what’d you do with my socks?’ I felt terrible. It seems I’d thrown them out. I said, ‘Oh, why, Horace, they’re right where they belong. Just use your eyes,’ I said. Then, while he was looking again, I went running to the garbage cans and dug through everything, hunting.”

  “I dreamed of chili,” Louisa said. “My, Morgan used to love chili. He was one of those boys that, you know, likes to hang over pots in the kitchen. Always took an interest in what I cooked. Many’s the time he asked me exactly what I’d put in something. ‘Why do you brown the onions first?’ Or, ‘Which is better in spaghetti—tomato sauce or tomato paste?’ ‘Neither one,’ I’d tell him, ‘you cook down your own tomatoes, from scratch.’ Well, that’s another story. Chili is what he loved best. But nowadays, I don’t know, I make this extra-special effort to talk about food with him the way he used to enjoy so much and it seems he doesn’t take the same interest. Hardly bothers to answer. Hardly even listens, it sometimes seems to me. But of course I may be wrong.”

  The doorbell rang. Emily turned from the sink and looked at Brindle.

  “Who could that be?” Brindle asked her.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe it’s Leon.”

  “But this is so early,” Emily said.

  “Well, for heaven’s sake, go see. You always act so wooden,” Brindle said.

  Emily wiped her hands and went to the door. Leon stood there in a new gray suit. He looked more polished than she’d remembered—his hair cut very close to his head, his skin dark and sleek—and he’d grown an oversized, droopy mustache. Emily had seen so many of those mustaches, exactly the same shape, on young men with briefcases, lawyers, executives. She could almost believe it was a borrowed mustache, pasted on. “Leon?” she said.

  “Hello, Emily.”

  She took a step back. (She hadn’t had time to get into her shoes yet.)

  “Is Gina ready?” he asked her.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  Then Morgan appeared, swinging Joshua in the air, saying, “Ups-a-daisy …” He stopped and said, “Why, Leon.”

  “Hello, Morgan.”

  “Won’t you come in?”

  “I can’t stay,” Leon said, but he stepped inside. Emily shut the door behind him. After a moment’s hesitation, Leon followed Morgan down the hall to the living room.

  Emily wished Morgan would take his spectacles off. Wearing them, he looked humble and domesticated. He held the baby slung over his shoulder and padded around the room, arranging seats. “Here, I’ll just move these, find someplace for this knitting … Well, ah, shall I call Gina?”

  “If you will, please.”

  Morgan gave Emily a look she couldn’t read and left, still carrying Josh.

  “So!” Leon said.

  “How are you, Leon?” Emily asked him.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You look well.”

  “You do too.”

  There was a pause.

  “You know I’m taking courses at the college,” Leon said. “Oh, really?”

  “Yes, when I get my degree, I’m enrolling in this training program at Dad’s bank. It’s interesting work, when you see it up close. You’d think it would be dull, but it’s really very interesting.”

  “That’s nice,” Emily said.

  “So I’d like to keep Gina year-round.”

  “You what?”

  “Now, Emily, don’t be hasty. Think this over. I’ve got a good apartment, stable life, schools nearby. I promise she could visit you any time she liked; I swear it. Emily, you have your son now. You have another child.”

  “Gina stays with me,” Emily said. Her teeth were chattering.

  “What kind of set-up is this for her?”

  “It’s a fine set-up.”

  Louisa appeared in the door, navigating the floorboards as if they lay under a foot of water. She made her way to Leon and said, “You’re sitting in my chair.”

  “Oh, sorry,” Leon said.

  He stood up. Emily said, “Um, do you remember Leon, Mother Gower?”

  “Yes, perfectly,” she said.

  Leon moved to the sofa next to Emily. He smelled of aftershave—not his own smell at all. Louisa arranged herself in her rocker and spread her skirt all around her.

  Then Brindle entered with a large, cracked mug of coffee. She sat on the end of the sofa nearest Leon. “So what have you been up to?” she asked him.

  “I’m planning to enroll in this training program at the bank.”

  “Oh, yes. Training program. Well, things have been in a fine pickle here, I can tell you.”

  “Brindle—” Emily said.

  But Louisa suddenly interrupted. “And where’s your pretty wife?” she asked Leon.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Where’s that girl that used to bring me fruitcake?” Leon looked at Emily. “I’ll go check on Gina,” Emily said. Even the flow of her skirt, as she walked out, seemed strained.

  She found Gina and Morgan standing together among the unmade beds, fiddling with Gina’s camp flashlight. “Naturally it doesn’t work,” Morgan was saying. He tipped the batteries into the palm of his hand. “You’ve filled it wrong.”

  “How could I have filled it wrong? I used what they said to use, D size.”

  “Yes, but the poles are not reversed, Gina.”

  “What poles?”

  “You know that batteries are polarized,” he said.

  Gina said, “No … but I have to leave now, Morgan.” She was jittery and restless, twisting a piece of hair, glancing toward the hall. Joshua had worked his way to a bureau and was tugging a satin strap from a drawer. Morgan noticed none of this. He was busy with the flashlight.

  “Observe,” he said, holding up a
battery. “A plus sign on the positive end. A minus sign on the negative end.”

  Emily felt wrenched by his elderly, instructive tone of voice. She came over to him and kissed his cheek. “Never mind that,” she told him. “We’re making Leon wait. Gina, run say hello to Daddy. We’ll fix your flashlight.”

  Gina left—released, like something snapped from a rubber band. Morgan shook his head and dropped the batteries in place. “Eleven years old and doesn’t know batteries are polarized,” he said. “How will she manage in the modern world?”

  “Morgan,” she said, just above a whisper. “Leon wants to keep her.”

  “Keep her? Hand me that cap, please.”

  “You don’t think he can make us give her up or anything, do you? In some court of law?”

  “Nonsense,” Morgan said, screwing the flashlight shut.

  “Morgan, I don’t understand how he and I switched sides here,” Emily said. “He used to claim I tied him down. Now all at once he’s going to work in a bank, and I lead an unstable life, he says.”

  “How can you have a more stable life than ours?” Morgan asked her. He dropped the flashlight into Gina’s trunk, closed the lid, and snapped the locks down.

  But in the living room it seemed that everyone was conspiring to seem as unstable as possible. Gina was sitting on Leon’s knee, which she had not done in years. She looked awkward and precarious. Louisa was knitting her eternal scarf. The dog was asking to go out: he paced up and down in front of Leon, his toenails clicking on the floor. And Brindle had somehow worked around to her favorite subject: Horace. “I never thought we had much in common because he was a gardening man, always messing in his garden. He owned the row-house next to ours when I was just a girl. We only had a little puddle of a yard, but he had a corner lot, with roses and azaleas out back and some of those tiny fruit trees that you flatten to a wall—tortured, I always said. I never liked that kind of tree. And a real little fountain with a statue of a goddess. Well, not real; just plaster or something, but still. He came out every morning and watered his flowers, pruned his shrubs if the merest sprig was out of place. I laughed at him for that. Then he brought me fresh-picked roses with the dew and the aphids still on them and I would say, ‘Oh, thanks,’ hardly caring, but if he didn’t come I started noticing. What doesn’t leave an empty space, if you’re used to it and it goes? I think he was lonesome. He said I put him in mind of his plaster goddess, but that just made me laugh more. One of her bosoms was hanging out and she didn’t have a nipple. And he was an old fellow, really, or seemed old then, these knotted white legs in gardening shorts … but when he came calling he wore trousers, and a white shirt with one of those collars that spread wide, like wings. Oh, I sincerely miss him still,” she said, “and I suppose I always will. Now it’s me that’s bringing roses, when I go to visit his grave.”

  “Everything’s packed,” Emily told Leon.

  “Good.”

  He set Gina aside and stood up.

  “What’s funniest,” said Brindle, rising also, “is I’m older now than Horace was when he started courting me. Can you believe it?”

  Leon gave Emily a long, stern look. It was plain what he was saying: Call this a fit life for a child? As if she understood, Louisa lifted her chin and fixed him with a glare.

  “Usually,” she told him, “I would be in a much more elegant place, I want you to know.”

  Then Brindle wheeled on her and said, “Oh, Mother, hush. Wouldn’t every one of us? Be quiet.”

  Still Emily wouldn’t answer what Leon was asking her.

  Leon and Morgan together carried the trunk through the hall. Harry led the way, in a joyful rush, and Gina followed with her sleeping bag. Emily had Joshua astride her hip. Already, so soon after his bath, he had a used look. Emily pressed her cheek to him and drew in his smell of milk and urine and baby powder. She trailed the others down the stairs.

  “I brought my father’s Buick because I knew we’d need the luggage space,” Leon was telling Morgan. “But maybe still I’ll have to get a rope from somewhere. I’m not so sure the lid will close.”

  “You want to keep a rope in your car at all times,” Morgan said. “Or better yet, one of those nylon-coated cords with hooks at either end. Simply go to any discount camping store, you see …”

  Leon set down his end of the trunk and rummaged through his pockets for the keys. The sun gave his hair a hard blue shine, like bits of coal. Emily studied him from the doorway. The odd thing was that although she no longer loved him, she had the feeling this was only another step in their marriage: his opening his father’s Buick, Morgan helping him load the trunk in, Gina tossing her sleeping bag alongside. They were linked, in some ways, forever. He turned back to her and held out a hand. It was probably the first time in her life that she had shaken hands with him.

  “Emily,” he said, “think about my suggestion.”

  “I can’t,” she said. She lifted the baby’s weight. Barefoot, with one hip slung out, she felt countrified and disadvantaged.

  “Just think about it. Promise.”

  Instead of answering, she went over to the car and bent to kiss Gina through the window. “Honey, be careful,” she said. “Have a good time. Call me if you’re homesick; please call.”

  “I will.”

  “Come back,” she said.

  “I will, Mama.”

  Emily stepped away from the car, and stood in the crook of Morgan’s arm, smiling hard and holding Josh very close.

  6

  “I’ve decided to become a writer,” Bonny said.

  “I’ve always had a bent in that direction. I’m writing a short story composed entirely of thirty years’ worth of check stubs and budget-book entries.”

  “What kind of story would that make?” Emily wondered. She sat down in the nearest kitchen chair, holding the receiver to her ear.

  “You’d be surprised at how a plot emerges. I mean, checks to the diaper service, then to the nursery schools, then to the grade schools … but it’s sad to see things were so cheap once. It seems pathetic that I spent ten dollars and sixteen cents on groceries for the second week of August nineteen fifty-one. Did Morgan see my personal?”

  “What personal?” Emily asked.

  (Of course he’d seen it.)

  “My personal in the classified section. Don’t tell me he doesn’t read the papers any more.”

  “Oh, did you put a personal in?”

  “It said, MORGAN G.: All is known. Didn’t he see it?”

  “Morgan can’t be bothered reading every notice in the paper.”

  “I thought that would really get him,” Bonny said. “How he would hate for all to be known!”

  She was right. He’d hated it. He’d said, “What does this mean? Of course I realize it must be Bonny’s doing, but … do you think it might be someone else? No, of course it’s Bonny. What does she mean, all is known? What’s known? What is she talking about?”

  “He likes to think he’s going through life as a stranger,” Bonny said.

  Emily said, “I believe I hear the baby crying.”

  “Sometimes,” Bonny said, “I wonder if there’s even any point in blaming him. It’s the way he is, right? It’s in his genes, or … None of his family has ever seemed quite normal to me. I didn’t know his father, of course, but what kind of man must he have been? Killing himself for no good reason. And his grandfather … and his great-great-uncle? Has he told you the story of his great-great-uncle? Uncle Owen, the black sheep. What would it take to be the black sheep of that family? You wonder. No one ever says, if they know. This was when the family was still in Wales. Uncle Owen was such an embarrassment, they sent him off to America. Sort of a … remittance man, is that what they call them?”

  “I’d better hang up,” Emily said.

  “When they sailed into New York Harbor, Uncle Owen was so excited he started dancing all over the deck,” Bonny said. “The sight of the Statue of Liberty drove him wild. He started jumping up
and down too close to the railing. Then he fell overboard and drowned.” She started laughing. “Do you believe it? This is a documented fact! It really happened!”

  “Bonny, I have to go now.”

  “Drowned!” said Bonny. “What a man!” And she went on laughing and laughing, no doubt shaking her head and wiping her eyes, for as long as Emily stood listening.

  7

  One night in August the doorbell rang with a stutter—two quick burrs before it fell silent. Morgan had gone out shopping. Emily thought he might be the one at the door, maybe too burdened to manage his key. But when she answered, she found a young, pale, fat boy, sweating heavily, teetering on dainty feet and holding a bouquet of red carnations. He said, “Mrs. Meredith?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will the dog bite?”

  She didn’t want to say he wouldn’t, though it should have been obvious. Harry sat beside her, no more interested than was polite, slapping his tail against the floor with a rubbery sound.

  “Well, fella. Down, fella,” the boy said, advancing. Emily stepped back. “You don’t know me,” he told her. “My name is Durwood Linthicum from Tindell, Maryland.”

  The shine on his forehead gave him a desperate, determined look. She thought he couldn’t be more than eighteen. She wondered if the flowers were for her. But then he said, “I brought these to give your husband.”

  “My husband?”

  “Mr. Meredith,” he said, pressing farther inward. She took another step back and bumped into a china barrel. “My father was Reverend R. Jonas Linthicum,” he said. “He’s passed now. Passed in June.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “Mr. Linthicum, my husband isn’t here just now—”

  “I see the name don’t strike a chord,” he said.

  “Um …”

  “Never mind, your husband will know it.”

  “Well, but, um …”

  “My father and Mr. Meredith used to correspond. Or at least, my father corresponded. My father ran the Holy Word Entertainment Troupe.”

  “Oh, yes,” Emily said.

  “You’ve heard of it.”

  “I remember your father wanted us to come … give Bible shows, wasn’t it?”