Morgan's Passing Read online

  He took a napkin from the dispenser and unfolded it and smoothed it across his knees.

  Emily said, “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Did sleeping with a woman make you orderly?”

  “How can you ask?” he said. He sighed.

  Their coffee arrived, and he seized the sugarbowl and started spooning out sugar. Four teaspoons, five … he stirred after each spoonful, and dripped coffee on the tabletop and into the bowl. Caramel-colored beads grew up across the surface of the sugar. Emily looked at them and then at Morgan. Morgan bared his teeth at her encouragingly. She looked away again.

  Why put up with him? He was really so strange that sometimes, out in public, she felt an urge to walk several paces ahead so that no one would guess they were acquainted. Or when the three of them were together, she’d make a point of taking Leon’s arm. But it was funny how he grew on a person. He added something; she couldn’t say just what. He made things look more interesting than they really were. Sometimes he accompanied the Merediths when they went to put on a puppet show, and from the squirrel-like attention he gave to all they did she would understand, suddenly, how very exotic this occupation was—itinerant puppeteers! Well, not itinerant, exactly, but still … and she’d look at Leon and realize what a flair he had, with his deep, dark eyes and swift movements. She herself would feel not quite so colorless; she would notice that Gina, who sometimes struck her as a little blowzy, was just like one of those cherubic children on a nineteenth-century chocolate box.

  “Leon’s picture was in the paper,” she told Morgan now.

  “Eh?”

  She leaned forward. She saw that this must be why she’d agreed to stop for coffee. “There was an article,” she said, “in the morning paper, all about our puppets.”

  “Oh, I missed it,” he said. “I left the house too early.”

  “They had a picture of the three of us, but really it was Leon’s article,” she said.

  Morgan lit a cigarette and tipped his chair back, studying her.

  “He talked about the puppets, how they’re … oh, not improvised. How they’re cut from a pattern.” She folded her hands and examined her knuckles. “He meant something by that. It’s hard to explain. If I tell you what it meant, you’ll think I’m imagining things.”

  “You probably are,” Morgan said.

  “And last night, this play he went to try for … what he used to do in the old days was, he’d memorize a part for tryouts. He wouldn’t just go and read it, like other people. He had this very quick memory. It always made an impression. So yesterday afternoon he started to learn the part he wanted, and it turned out he couldn’t do it. He’d memorize one line and go on to the next, but when he put the two together he found he’d forgotten the first one and he’d have to begin all over again. It kept happening. It was eerie, I knew the lines, finally, just from hearing them; but he still didn’t. And he blamed me for it. He didn’t say so outright, but he did. I know.”

  “You’re imagining things,” Morgan said. “It’s true that he’s changed since he met me,” Emily said.

  Morgan rocked on his chair legs, smoking and frowning. He said, “Did I ever tell you I was married once before?”

  “What? No, I don’t think so. And now he’s so friendly with his parents. Well, of course he can say that’s all my doing; I used to be the only one who spoke to them. But now it seems … well, truthfully, they visit a little too much. He gets on with them a little too well.”

  “I married during my senior year in college,” Morgan said. “Her name was Letitia. We eloped and never told a soul. But as soon as we got married, we lost interest in each other. It was the funniest thing. We took up with different crowds; Letitia became involved in an antique-music group and went off to New York over Christmas vacation … we drifted apart, as they say. We went our separate ways.”

  Emily couldn’t see why he was telling her this. She made an effort and sat straighter in her chair. “Is that right?” she said. “So you got a divorce?”

  “Well, no.”

  “What happened, then?”

  “Nothing happened,” Morgan said. “We just went our ways. No one knew about the elopement, after all.”

  Emily thought back over what he’d told her. She said, “But then you’d be a bigamist.”

  “Technically speaking, I suppose I am,” Morgan said cheerfully.

  “But that’s illegal!”

  “Well, yes, I guess it is, in a way.”

  She stared at him.

  “But it’s really very natural,” he told her. “It’s quite fitting, when you stop to consider. Aren’t we all sitting on stacks of past events? And now every level is neatly finished off, right? Sometimes a lower level bleeds into an upper level. Isn’t that so?”

  “Honestly,” Emily said. “What has this got to do with anything?” She reached for her purse and stood up. Morgan stood too and came lunging around to pull her chair back, but she was too quick for him. She didn’t even wait for him to pay the cashier. She walked on out the door and left him at the register, and he had to run to catch up with her.

  “Emily?” he said.

  “I have to be getting home now.”

  “But I seem to have strayed from my point. All your talk of bigamy, legalities, you made me forget what I wanted to say.”

  “Half the time, Morgan,” Emily said, “I believe you’re telling out-and-out lies. I believe you just told me one. You did, didn’t you? Did you? Or not?”

  “See, Emily,” Morgan said, “of course he’s changed. Everybody does; everyone goes bobbing along, in and out of inlets, snagging on pilings, skating down rapids … Well, I mustn’t get carried away. But, Emily, you’re still close. You haven’t parted directions. You’re still very much alike.”

  “Alike!” said Emily. She stopped in front of a newsstand. “How can you say that? We’re totally different. We come from totally different backgrounds. Even our religions are different.”

  “Really?” said Morgan. “What religion is Leon?”

  “Oh, Presbyterian, Methodist …” She started walking again. “We’re nothing at all alike.”

  “To me you are,” Morgan said. “And you get along so well.”

  “Ha,” said Emily bitterly.

  “You have the happiest marriage I know of, Emily. I love your marriage!”

  “Well, I can’t think why,” Emily said.

  But she let herself fall into step with him.

  They passed a woman painting her front door a bright green. “Apple green, my favorite color!” Morgan called, and the woman laughed and bowed like someone on a stage. They passed an open window where Fats Domino sang “I’m Walkin’,” and Morgan spread his arms and started dancing. The fact that he had a cigarette clamped in his teeth made it look difficult and precarious; he reminded Emily of those Russians who dance with a glass of vodka on their heads. She stood to one side, awkwardly swinging her purse and smiling. Then Morgan stopped and took his cigarette from his mouth. “Why, look at that,” he said. He was staring at something just behind her. She turned, but it was nothing—a car parked next to a mailbox.

  “My car!” he said.

  “Your what?”

  “It’s my car!”

  “Are you sure?”

  But that was a silly question; even Emily was sure. (And why would he claim such a ruined object, otherwise?) Morgan rushed around it, breathing rapid puffs of smoke. “See?” he said. “There’s Lizzie’s tennis racket, my turban, my sailor suit that I was bringing home from … See that Nehi bottle? It’s been rolling up and down the back window ledge for the past six months. Or,” he said, pausing, “is it possible that someone else might have a car just like this?”

  “Really, Morgan,” Emily said. “Of course it’s yours. Go call the police.”

  “What for? Why not just steal it back?”

  “Well, you want the thief arrested, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said, “but meanwhile
it’s parked in a No Parking zone and I might be given a ticket.”

  “When it wasn’t you that parked it there?”

  “You can never tell, in this world,” he said. “I promised Bonny I wouldn’t run up more traffic fines.” He was trying all the doors, but they were locked. He walked around to the front of the car and settled on his haunches before the grille. “I don’t suppose you have your Swiss Army knife with you,” he said.

  “My what? No.”

  He plucked at a string that was looped through the grille. Then he set his face close and started gnawing at the string. The woman who’d been painting lowered her brush and turned to watch. “I don’t understand what you’re after,” Emily said.

  “The key,” Morgan said. Something clinked to the ground. He groped beneath the car for it.

  “Over to your right,” Emily told him. “Closer to the wheel.”

  Morgan stretched out on his stomach, with his legs trailing behind him. (The soles of his snake-proof boots were as deeply ridged as snow tires.) He reached farther under the car. “Got it,” he said. A little three-wheeled mail truck the size of a golf cart bounced up and stopped. “Help!” Morgan shouted, and he raised his head. She heard his helmet clang against the underside of the bumper. “I’m hit!” he said.

  “Morgan?”

  “I’m run over! It’s my leg!”

  A mailman descended from the truck, whistling, and started toward the mailbox. Emily grabbed his sleeve and said, “Move.”

  “Huh?”

  “Move the truck! You’ve run a man over.”

  “Sheesh,” said the mailman. “Don’t he see the No Parking sign?”

  “Move that truck this instant, I tell you!”

  “All right, all right,” the mailman said. He turned back to his truck, glancing down at Morgan on the way. Morgan showed him a face that seemed all teeth.

  “Hurry,” said Emily, wringing a handful of skirt.

  Meanwhile the woman with the paintbrush arrived, dripping apple green. “Oh, that poor, poor man,” she said. Emily knelt next to Morgan. She had a sick weight on the floor of her stomach. But at least there was no blood. Morgan’s leg, pinned at the shin beneath the toy tire, looked flattened but still in one piece. He was breathing raggedly. Emily laid a hand on his back. “Are you in pain?” she asked him.

  “Not as much as you might expect.”

  “He’s going to move the truck.”

  “Of all the damn-fool, ridiculous—”

  “Never mind, it could happen to anyone,” Emily said, patting his back.

  “I was talking about the mailman.”

  “Oh.”

  The mailman released his brake. The truck gave a grinding sound and inched backward. “Oof!” said Morgan. He rolled free. He sat up and inspected his leg. A dusty, wedge-shaped mark ran down the green fabric.

  “Is it broken?” Emily asked him. “I don’t know.”

  “Rip his pants,” the woman with the paintbrush suggested.

  “Not the pants!” said Morgan. “They’re World War Two.”

  Emily started folding up the cuff, working gingerly, tensed for what she might have to see. By now, two old ladies with shopping bags had joined them, and the mailman was telling them, “I could report him for illegal parking, if I was that bad of a guy.”

  “There’s nothing here,” Emily said. She was inspecting Morgan’s pale, hairy shin. “Can you wiggle your toes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you stand?”

  He attempted it, with an arm around Emily for support. He was heavier than he looked, hard-muscled, warm, and he gave off the harsh gray smell of someone who’d been working for a very long time. “Yes,” he said, “I can stand.”

  “Maybe he just ran over your trousers.”

  He drew back from her. “That’s not true at all,” he said.

  “But there’s no blood, the bone’s not broken …”

  “I felt it. I felt the pressure, a pinch, so to speak, at one side of my calf. You think I don’t know when I’m hit? Not all hurts show up from outside. You can’t just stand outside and pass judgment on whether I’ve been injured or not. You think I don’t know when a U.S. Government mail truck pins me flat to the pavement?”

  “Jesus,” said the mailman.

  The two old ladies went on their way, and the woman returned to her painting. The mailman unlocked the mailbox. Morgan held up a hand; something glittered. “But at least I’ve got the key,” he told Emily.

  “Oh, yes. The key.”

  He opened the door on the passenger side. “Quick. Jump in,” he said.

  “Me?”

  “Jump in the car. What if the thief comes? All this racket, this hullabaloo …”

  He waited till she’d climbed in, and then he closed the door and came around to the driver’s side. “I’ve had too much excitement lately,” he told her. “I don’t know why things can’t go a little more smoothly.” He settled himself with a grunt and leaned forward to fit the key in the ignition. “Now look,” he said. “Another difficulty.”

  The key wouldn’t go. A second key was already there, and a dangling leather case. “What are these?” he asked Emily.

  “They must have been locked in the car,” she said.

  “I’m always amazed,” Morgan said, “by how incompetent your average criminal is.”

  “But maybe the car wasn’t stolen at all,” Emily told him.

  “How could that be?”

  “Maybe you just thought you parked in that other block.”

  “No, no,” he said impatiently. “That would be ridiculous.” He started the motor, veered out around the mail truck, and headed up the street. It sounded as if he were in the wrong gear. “Come back with me and meet Bonny,” he said.

  “Oh, Leon will be wondering where I am. And anyway, don’t you have to go to work?”

  “I can’t work today; I only had an hour of sleep last night. It was Brindle, this business with Brindle. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Robert Roberts, after all these years!”

  Emily hoped he wouldn’t start on Robert Roberts again. She felt exhausted. It seemed to her that those few blocks from Gina’s school had taken hours, days; she’d expended years’ worth of energy on them. The sight of Morgan beside her (humming “I’m Walkin’ ” and tapping the steering wheel, fresh as a daisy, without a care in the world) made her head ache.

  But then her apartment building approached. Crafts Unlimited was just opening, and its fluorescent lights were fluttering on and off as if unable to gather strength. The windows above it were dark. You could imagine that the building was nothing but an empty shell. Morgan sailed past, still humming. Emily didn’t try to stop him.

  2

  Emily and Leon had given a good deal of thought to Morgan’s wife—to what she must be like, considering the amount of time he spent away from her. He was always dropping in on the Merediths for a visit, mentioning other places he’d just come from and still others where he was heading afterward. Was he ever home at all, in fact? Even weekends? For on Saturdays he engaged in his own unique style of shopping. He would travel to the depths of Baltimore and return with unlikely items: dented canned goods, or knobby packages wrapped in brown paper and tied all around with string in a dozen clumsy knots. (You would think they hadn’t heard of bagging yet, where Morgan shopped.) Sundays he went to fairs and festivals. At events where Emily and Leon took their puppets, they might even run into him purely by chance. They’d look through the scrim at the seated audience—no more than a long, low hillock—and find him standing at the rear, this sudden jutting peak topped by some outlandish hat, always alone, always brooding over something and puffing on a cigarette. (But when they came out afterward to take their bows, he’d be beaming mightily and clapping like a proud parent.) Winters, when the fairs died down, he’d go to church bazaars and grade-school fund-raisers. No occasion was too small for him. He was never too busy to stop and contemplate the appliquéd felt Christmas-tree sk
irts or the Styrofoam snowmen with sequin eyes. So who was this Bonny, whom he was so eager to leave? Maybe she nagged him, Leon said. Maybe she was one of those tight, crimped ladies holding court alone in her careful living room, among the polished figurines that Morgan mustn’t touch and the crystal ashtrays he mustn’t flick his ashes into. But Emily didn’t think so. Putting together all that Morgan said (his rush of accidents and disasters, his admiration of the Merediths’ stripped apartment), she imagined Bonny as a slattern, in a zip-front housedress and a headful of pincurls. She wasn’t surprised when Morgan parked his car in front of a well-kept brick Colonial house—after all, she’d known there was money, and slate tiles for the roof—but she blinked when she stepped out and found a brown-haired woman in a neat skirt and blouse weeding petunias along the front walk. Well, maybe it was the sister. But Morgan said, “Bonny?”

  Bonny straightened and wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. There were a few faint smile lines around her eyes. Her lipstick was a chipped, cracked, glossless red. She looked cheerful but noncommittal; she seemed to be waiting for Morgan to explain himself.

  “Bonny, this is Emily Meredith,” Morgan said.

  Bonny went on waiting.

  “Emily and her husband run a puppet show,” Morgan said.

  “Oh, really?”

  It hadn’t occurred to Emily that Bonny wouldn’t have heard of her. (She had heard of Bonny, after all.) She felt a little hurt. She held out her hand and said, “How do you do, Mrs. Gower.”

  Bonny shook her hand. She said, “Well, are … you here to see Morgan? Or what?”

  “She’s here to see you,” Morgan told her.

  “Me?”

  Morgan said, “What happened was, my car was stolen, but then I stole it back, by and by, but still there was so much excitement, what with Robert Roberts and all …”

  “You mean, you asked her to come inside the house?”

  “Oh!” Emily said. “Well, of course I don’t want to interrupt your work.”