by Anne Tyler
MORGAN GOWER, HARDWARE STORE MANAGER
Morgan Gower, 53, who maintained a home at the Tindell Acres Trailer Park, died yesterday after a lengthy illness.
Mr. Gower had served as manager of the downtown branch of Cullen Hardware, in Baltimore.
He is survived by …
He raised his head and looked around him. The drugstore was of old, dark wood, its shelves sparsely stocked. In some spots there was only one of an item—one box of Sweet ’N Low packets, its corners dented; one tube of Prell shampoo with a sticky green cap. It was definitely a real place. It smelled of damp cardboard. The saleslady was ancient, her skin so wrinkled that it seemed quilted, and her glasses hung on a chain around her neck.
… is survived by his wife, the former Bonny Jean Cullen; seven daughters, Amy G. Murphy, of Baltimore; Jean G. Hanley, also of Baltimore; Susan Gower, of Charlottesville, Virginia …
“Sir,” the saleslady said, holding out his change.
He closed the newspaper and pocketed the money.
Outside, a cold, damp wind hit him. It was Sunday morning. The streets were empty and the sidewalks seemed wider and whiter than usual. All the other stores were closed—the little dimestore, the grocery store, the barbershop. He walked past them slowly. His pickup was parked in front of the Hollywood Stars Beautician. The red plywood box constructed over its truckbed (MEREDITH PUPPET CO. arching across each side) creaked in the wind. Morgan climbed into the cab. He opened his pack of cigarettes and lit one. Coughing his habitual, hacking cough, he spread out the paper again.
… Carol G. Haines, also of Charlottesville; Elizabeth G. Wing, of Nashville, Tennessee …
He set it down and started the engine. Fool paper; fool backwoods editors. Even they, you’d think, would have the common sense, the decency, to check a thing like that before they printed it. Where were their standards? You call that journalism?
He drove up Main Street, puffing rapidly on his cigarette. At Main and Howell the traffic light was red. He braked, and glanced sideways at the paper.
… Molly G. Abbott, of Buffalo, New York; Kathleen G. Brustein, of Chicago …
Someone behind him honked, and he started off again. He veered from Howell into an alley, a moonscape of bleached, stubbled clay with a few empty beer bottles tossed in the weeds, and from there to the state highway. Up ahead lay the trailer park. A flaking metal sign spelled out TINDELL ACRES MONTHLY RATES J. PROUTT PROPRIETOR. He turned left on the gravel road and passed the office—a streamlined aluminum trailer whose cinderblock steps and flowerboxes attempted to give it a rooted look. Also his mother, Louisa Brindle Gower, a persistent voice continued in his mind; a sister, Brindle G. T. Roberts, and eleven grandchildren. Behind the office, a dozen smaller trailers sat at haphazard angles to one another. They might have been tossed there by a fractious child, along with the items of scrap all around them—discarded butane tanks, a rust-stained mattress, a collapsed sofa with a sapling growing up between two of its cushions. Morgan drove past an old woman in a man’s tweed overcoat. He parked in front of a small green trailer and got out. The woman turned to look after him, brushing wisps of gray hair from her eyes. It was obvious she planned to start a conversation. Morgan would not admit she was there. He rushed toward the trailer, keeping his head ducked. His mouth felt too large. He had, he observed detachedly, all the physical symptoms of … shame; yes, that was it. How peculiar. He felt insufficiently shielded by his cap, which was trim, narrowly visored, of no particular character. He turned up the collar of his jacket before he fumbled at the door.
“Cold enough for you?” the woman called in a thin, carrying voice.
He bowed lower over the lock.
“Yoo-hoo! Mr. Meredith!”
Services will be private.
Emily was cooking breakfast. He smelled bacon, a special Sunday treat. Josh was toddling through the living room in a pair of sodden corduroy overalls with one strap trailing. Morgan scooped him into his arms and Josh chuckled.
“Did you get the paper?” Emily asked.
He set Joshua down again. “No,” he said.
He had left it in the truck. He would dispose of it later on.
There was no reason to feel so embarrassed. Bonny was the one who ought to feel embarrassed. (For it was Bonny who had done it, he assumed. Of course it was. Wasn’t it?) What a silly reaction to have! He considered himself with a remote, bemused curiosity. Even his posture seemed furtive—the way he walked the length of the trailer with as little noise as possible, stooped, head ducked, as if trying not to disturb the air. He went from the living room (one couch beneath a small, louvered window) through the narrow aisle between a table and the counter that was their kitchen. Sidling past Emily, he kissed the back of her neck. She had a ripple of bones down her nape that reminded him of the scalloped spines of some seashells.
He continued into the bedroom, with its single built-in bureau and bed. A Port-a-Crib took all the remaining space. To reach the little curtained closet in one corner, he had to clamber across the bed. He took his cap off and set it on the shelf next to Emily’s suitcase. He took his jacket off and hung it on a hanger. He had bought the jacket last November at a place called Frugal Fred’s. Having left his extra clothes behind when he fled Baltimore, he had found himself with nothing warm enough to get him through the winter, and he’d paid five dollars for this heavy blue jacket that must once have been part of an Air Force uniform, although it was bland and dull now, undecorated. All the insignia seemed to have been removed, leaving empty stitches on the sleeves and across one pocket. He supposed that was some sort of regulation. They wouldn’t want anyone impersonating an officer, naturally. Yes, it was only sensible. But sometimes he liked to imagine that the insignia had been ripped away. He pictured a scene in a field—the ranks of men standing at attention, the bugle call, the drums, Morgan stepping smartly forward, his commanding officer stripping him of his stripes in a single dramatic gesture. Whenever he thought of this, he walked straighter in his jacket and took on an impassive expression: the look of a man who had willfully, recklessly directed his life on a collision course toward ruin. However, he knew it was a jacket that no one would glance at twice. And his cap was what they called a Greek sailor cap, but not really Greek-looking, not seaworthy-looking; everybody wore them nowadays, even teenaged girls at the local high school, tilting the visors over their jumbles of curls.
He washed his hands in the tiny bathroom and returned to the kitchen. Emily was dishing out breakfast. He sat down at the table and watched her lay two strips of bacon on his plate. “Come eat, Josh,” she called.
Josh was running a tin trolley car along the edge of the couch. He brought the trolley to the table with him, swaggering along in his rocking-horse gait, studiously silent. (He was the quietest, most accepting child Morgan had ever known.) In his layers of shirts and sweaters he seemed to be having trouble bending his chunky arms. Emily picked him up and set him in his chair. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to his cup.
“It’s orange juice, Josh.”
Josh took a bite from a strip of bacon, fed another bite to the front window of his trolley car.
“Did you mail my letter?” Emily asked Morgan, sitting down across from him.
“What letter?”
“My letter to Gina, Morgan.”
“Oh, yes,” Morgan said. “I took it to that box in front of the Post Office.”
“It’ll reach Richmond by Tuesday, then,” Emily said.
“Well, or Wednesday.”
“If she writes me back the same day, I might get a letter on Friday.”
“Mm.”
“She hardly ever writes the same day, though.”
“No.”
“I wish she were a better letter-writer.”
He said nothing. She looked up at him.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“Wrong?”
“You seem different.”
“I’m fine,” he said.
/> She went back to buttering her toast. Her hands were white with cold, the nails bluish. The curve of her lashes cast faint shadows on her cheeks. It struck him how unchanged she was. Year after year, while everyone around her grew older, Emily kept her young, pale, unlined face, and her light-colored eyes gave her a look of perpetual innocence. She wore the same clothes. Her hair was the same style, piled in braids on top of her head with a few stray tendrils corkscrewing at her neck to give her a hint of some secret looseness—always possible, never realized—that could stir him still.
Well, he would go to the editors. Of course he would. He’d go storming in with the paper. “See here, what’s the meaning of this? Don’t you people ever check your facts? Morgan Gower, Hardware Store Manager! Where’s your sense of responsibility? I am Morgan Gower. Here I stand before you.”
But they would say, “Aren’t you that fellow Meredith? One that works for young Durwood?”
In fact, he had no case.
2
Emily zipped Josh into his jacket for a walk, but Morgan decided not to go with them. “Don’t you feel well?” she asked him.
“I’m fine, I tell you.”
“Did you pick up those coughdrops?”
“Yes, yes, somewhere here …” He slapped his pockets and beamed at her, intending reassurance. She went on frowning. “Don’t forget we have that show tonight,” she told him.
“No, I haven’t forgotten.”
After they left, he watched them through the living-room window—Emily a fragile little thread of a person, Josh in his fat red jacket trudging along beside her. They were heading north, across a field, toward the scrubby pine woods that ran along the highway. The field was so lumpy and rutted that sometimes Joshua stumbled, but Emily had hold of his hand. Morgan could imagine her tight, steady grip—the steely cords in her wrist, like piano wire.
He turned away from the window a fraction of a second before the phone rang, as if he’d been expecting it. Maybe he just wouldn’t answer. It was sure to be someone pushing in, someone who’d found him out: “So! I hear you died.” But, of course, no one had any way of knowing. He made himself go into the bedroom, where the phone sat on the bureau. It rang six times before he reached it. He lifted the receiver, took a breath, and said, “Hello.”
“Is that you, Sam?” a man asked.
“Yes.”
“It is?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t sound like yourself.”
“I’ve got a cold,” Morgan said.
Morgan grinned into the mirror.
“Well, I guess you heard what happened to Lady.”
Then a strange thing happened. It felt as if the floor just skated a few feet away from him. Not that he lost his balance; he stood as firm as ever, and his head was perfectly clear. But there was some optical illusion. His surroundings appeared to glide past him. He might have been riding one of those conveyor belts that carry passengers into airport terminals. Come to think of it, he had felt this way once before in an airport near Los Angeles. He’d gone to fetch Susan—it must have been four or five years ago; she’d had some kind of crack-up over a broken love affair—and after flying all one day he’d landed but gone on flying, it felt like. Or everything had flown around him, as if he’d been traveling so long, such a distance, that a sudden stop was impossible. He blinked, and reached out for the bureau.
“Sam?” the man asked.
“I’m not Sam. Please. You have the wrong number.”
He hung up. He looked around the trailer, and found it stable again.
Then he took his cap and jacket from the closet and put them on, and he wrote a note to Emily: Gone on an errand. Back soon. He let himself out the door and crossed the yard to his truck and climbed in.
It was a forty-five-minute drive to Baltimore, and all through it he talked steadily underneath his breath. “Silly damn Bonny,” he muttered, “damn meddler; stupid, interfering meddler, thinks she’s so—” He glanced in the rear-view mirror and swung out to pass a van. “Sitting there rubbing her hands together, laughing at me; thinks she got to me somehow. Ha, that’s how much she knows, yes …”
He wondered how she’d found out what town he lived in. He had never told her. He considered the possibility that she had put the item in every paper in the state of Maryland—every paper in the country, even. Lord, all across the continent, for anyone to see. He pictured her telephoning hundreds and thousands of editors, rushing into their offices, trailing balls of Kleenex and rough drafts on the backs of cash-register tapes—a woman with her accelerator stuck. She had always lived a headlong kind of life. Any mental image he had of her (he thought, honking at a wandering sports car) showed her breathless, with her hair in her eyes and her blouse untucked. Look how she’d thrown his clothes out, and his mother and his sister and the dog! Cursing to himself, slamming on his brakes, he forgot that she had thrown them out at different times. He imagined that she’d dumped them all at once. He seemed to remember Brindle and Louisa, deposited in front of the hardware store, waiting on little camp stools till he could collect them. Or, why camp stools, even? Lying on their backs, like overturned beetles, in an ocean of discarded costumes. He recalled that Bonny often seemed to be held together by safety pins. Safety pins connected a slip strap to her slip, a buttonhole to the thready place where a button should have been, and her watch to its black ribbon band. And the watch was almost never wound. And the gaps in her hems were repaired with Scotch tape that rustled when she walked; no, when she ran; no, when she galloped by. She had never been known to just walk.
This used to be all farmland, but now each town was linked to the others by a frayed strand of filling stations and shopping malls. Morgan sped along. The superstructure on his truckbed moaned. The padlock on its rear door clanked whenever he slowed down.
“Thinks she’s so clever, thinks I care. Thinks it matters what fool thing she does to me.”
He entered the outskirts of Baltimore. They’d put up more apartment buildings. You couldn’t turn your back, it seemed. At a traffic light a boy braked beside him in a long, finned Dodge that must have been twenty years old. All the windows were closed, but the music on his radio was so loud that it sailed out anyhow—the “Steadily Depressing, Low-Down, Mind-Messing, Working at the Carwash Blues.” In spite of himself, Morgan beat time on the steering wheel.
At least there was a little sun here—a pale, weak, late-winter sun lighting white steeples and empty sidewalks. He drove north on Charles, passing a stream of small shops and then the University, deserted-looking, its buildings clean and precisely placed like something built of toy blocks. He turned into a corridor of large houses, cafés, apartment buildings, and parked on Bonny’s street but some distance from her house, so she wouldn’t easily see the truck from her windows. Then he got out and lit a cigarette and started waiting.
It was cold, even in the sunlight. He raised his collar around his ears. He saw the newspaper on Bonny’s front walk. Ten-something in the morning and she hadn’t brought it in yet; typical. A cardinal was sitting in the dogwood tree, a drop of red in a net of black branches. Morgan wondered if it could be one of those who’d hatched in that nest in the mock-orange bush a few years back. He felt some proprietary interest. All one summer he’d chased the cat away; the parent birds would alert him, fluttering and giving their anxious chirps that sounded like the clink of loose change in a pocket. But didn’t cardinals migrate? His cigarette tasted like burning trash. He ground it out.
Then here came Billy’s wife, Priscilla, tapping up the walk in her spiffy white coat, carrying her basket-shaped purse that was sure to have a whale carved on its lid. She disappeared into the house. (She had to step right over the paper.) She was extraneous, no one he ever gave much thought to; he dismissed her instantly. He leaned forward and watched the door open again. Out popped a boy. His grandson? Todd? If so, he’d grown. He was carrying a yellow skateboard, and when he reached the street he just walked away—here one second,
gone the next, for Morgan didn’t watch after him. He was centered on that door still.
A long time went by. He leaned against the hood of the truck and listened to the engine ticking as it cooled.
The door first darkened, drawing inward, and then vanished altogether. Bonny stepped out on the stoop. Beneath her matted brown cardigan she wore something peasantish, unbecoming—a gauzy, full blouse, and a gathered skirt that made her look fat. Morgan assumed she was heading for the paper, but she ignored it as the others had and continued down the walk. Morgan slid around behind the truck. She didn’t even look in his direction. She turned west, bustling along. He saw something flash in her hand—her red billfold, no doubt overstuffed as always with credit cards, outdated photos, and wrinkled little wads of money.
For a while he followed, keeping well back. He knew where she was going, of course. On a Sunday morning, with Priscilla there, and Todd, and who knew how many other people, she’d be off to the bakery for cinnamon rolls. But he followed anyway, and fixed his eyes on her. She’d let her hair grow, he noticed—a mistake. The puffy little clump at the back of her neck had turned into a sort of oval, with tattered ends.
What was going on in that head?
This was why he’d come: to find out. He’d driven here without wondering what for, and was confronted with it now so abruptly that he stopped short. All he wanted to ask was, why had she done it?
Was some meaning implied?
Did she imagine …?
No, surely not.
Did she imagine he really had passed away?
“Passed away” was all he was up to just now. “Died” would stick in his throat. No, he couldn’t ask that.
He continued to stand there while Bonny went on racing toward the bakery.
Then he turned and went back to the house. He circled around it. (The front door opened to the center hall, where anyone might see him enter.) He walked to the side, toward the screen porch, reached through a rip in the screen and raised the rusty hook and let himself in. The moldly smell of the wicker furniture—like mice, like cheap magazines—reminded him of summer. He tried the knob of the glass-paned door that led to the living room. It was unlocked. (He’d warned them a thousand times.) Soundlessly, he slipped in.
