Morgan's Passing Read online

  “It’s all right,” Bonny said. “Why don’t you roll down your pants leg, Morgan?” She turned to lead them up the walk.

  “But, Mrs. Gower—”

  “Stay, stay,” Morgan urged, from a bent position. He flattened his cuff around his ankle. “She’s just surprised. You’ve come this far, stay!”

  Emily followed Bonny up the steps. She felt she had no choice, although she would rather have been anywhere else. They passed a clay pot in which herbs were growing—chives and maybe marjoram or thyme. Emily looked at them wistfully. Under other conditions, she thought, Bonny might very well have been someone she was fond of, but they’d got started wrong. It was Morgan’s fault. He was so thoughtless and abrupt. She felt irritated by his dishpan-shaped helmet, bounding along beside her. “Notice Bonny’s roses,” he said. It could have been a hint—a clue to Bonny’s soft spot—but Bonny said, without turning, “How can she? They’re not blooming yet.”

  The three of them entered the hall. On the radiator were a stack of library books with scummy plastic covers, a watering can, and a box of Triscuits. Emily had to watch her step through a little turmoil of shoes and sneakers, and by then they’d reached the living room. “Look!” Morgan said, pouncing on a vase. “This is what Amy made at camp, the summer she was ten.”

  “It’s very pretty,” Emily said. It was lopsided, and a crack ran down from the rim.

  “I wish you could meet her, but she lives in Roland Park now. You can meet Mother and Brindle, though.”

  “Brindle’s out shopping for a wedding ring,” Bonny said.

  “A ring! Yes, I’ve told Emily all about that. And see, here’s Molly’s picture on the mantel. Isn’t she beautiful? It’s from her school play; they say she has a talent for acting. I can’t imagine where she got it. There’s never been an actor in our family. What do you think of her? Bonny, don’t we still have Jeannie’s wedding album?”

  There was something feverish about him, Emily thought. He darted around the room, rummaging through various overloaded shelves. Emily and Bonny stood in the doorway watching him. Once they happened to glance at each other, but when Emily saw Bonny’s expression—oddly hooded—she looked away again. “Please,” she told Morgan, “I ought to be going. I’ll just catch a bus and go, please.”

  “But you haven’t met my mother!” he said, stopping short. “And I wanted Bonny to get to know you; I wanted you two to … Bonny, Emily was in the paper today.”

  “Was she?” Bonny said.

  “Where’s the paper? Did you throw it out?”

  “I think it’s in the kitchen.”

  “Come to the kitchen. Let’s all go! Let’s all have some coffee,” he said. He raced away. Bonny straightened from the door frame to follow him, and Emily trailed behind. She wished she could just vanish. She thought of ducking out soundlessly, slipping away before they noticed. She dodged a mobile of homemade paper sailing ships and stepped into the kitchen.

  The counters in the kitchen were stacked with dirty dishes, and several animals’ feeding bowls cluttered the floor. One wall was shingled with yellow cartoons and news clippings and hockey schedules, recipes, calendar, photographs, telephone numbers on torn corners of paper, dental appointment cards, invitations—even someone’s high-school diploma. Emily felt surrounded, flooded. Over by the back door Morgan was plowing through a stack of newspapers. “Where is it? Where is it? Did it come?” he asked. “Aha!” He held up a paper. He laid it flat on the floor, licked his thumb, and started turning pages. “News … editorials … craft revival in Baltimore!”

  Peering over his shoulder, Emily saw Leon’s sober face. He seemed to be staring at her out of another world. “Bonny, here’s Leon. Emily’s husband,” Morgan said. “And here’s her daughter, Gina. See?”

  “Very nice,” said Bonny, setting out coffee cups.

  “You know,” Morgan said thoughtfully, “I once looked a little like Leon.”

  Bonny glanced at the photo. “Like that man there? Never,” she said. “You’re two totally different types.”

  “Well, yes,” he said, “but there’s something about the eyes, maybe; I don’t know. Or something around the mouth. Or maybe it’s the forehead. I don’t know.”

  He stood up, abandoning the paper, and pulled out a chair from the table. “Sit down, sit down,” he told Emily. He took a seat opposite, as if demonstrating, and fixed her with an urgent, focused look till she sat too. She felt trapped. The dishes on the counters towered so far above her that she imagined they might teeter and topple, swamping her. A typewriter stood in a puddle of orange juice on the table, with a sheet of paper in the carriage … resolution was passed by a show of hands, she read, and Matilda Grayson requested that … Bonny placed a carton of cream in front of her and a crumpled sack of Pantry Pride sugar.

  “Were you working on something special?” asked Emily, motioning toward the typewriter.

  “Yes,” Bonny said. She handed Emily a cup of coffee and sat down next to her.

  “Um … what do you do for a living, Mrs. Gower?”

  “I’m Morgan’s wife for a living.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Yes,” Bonny said, “but do you see that it’s a full-time job? It keeps me busy every minute, I tell you. Oh, from outside he seems so comic and light-hearted, such a character, so quaint, but imagine dealing with him. I mean, the details of it, the coping, stuck at home while he’s off somewhere, wondering who he thinks he is now. Do you suppose we couldn’t all act like that? Go swooping around in a velvet cape with a red satin lining and a feathered hat? That part’s the easy part. Imagine being his wife, finding a cleaner who does ostrich plumes. Keeping his dinner warm. Imagine waiting dinner while he’s out with one of his cronies that I have never met—Salvation Army bums or astrologists or whatever other awestruck, smitten people he digs up.”

  Emily set her cup down.

  “You think I don’t appreciate him. You wonder why he married me,” Bonny said.

  “No, no,” said Emily. She looked across at Morgan, who seemed unperturbed. He was tipping contentedly in his chair, like a child who is confident he’s the center of attention, and puffing on a cigarette. Twisted ropes of smoke hung around his head.

  “Emily,” Bonny said.

  Emily turned to her.

  “Emily, Morgan is the manager of a hardware store.”

  Emily waited, but that was the end of it. Bonny seemed to be expecting her to speak. “Yes,” Emily said, after a minute.

  “Cullen Hardware,” Bonny said.

  “She knows that, Bonny,” Morgan said.

  “She does?”

  Bonny stared at him. Then she asked Emily, “You don’t think he’s a … rabbi or a Greek shipping magnate?”

  “No,” Emily said.

  She decided not to mention how they’d met.

  Bonny pressed her fingers to her lips. There were freckles, Emily saw, dusting the back of her hand. After all, she was a pleasant woman; she gave a little laugh. “You must think I’ve lost my mind,” she said. “Crazy Bonny, right? Morgan’s crazy wife, Bonny.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “It’s just that I worried you might have been … misled. Morgan’s such a, well, a prankster, in a way.”

  “Yes. I know about that.”

  “You do?” Bonny said.

  She glanced over at Morgan. Morgan smiled seraphically and blew out a whoosh of smoke.

  “But I think he’s trying to give it up,” said Emily.

  “Oh, I hope so!” Bonny said. “Why! It takes so much ingenuity to manage some of that foolishness … think what he could accomplish if he used that brain for sensible things! If he straightened out. If he decided to go straight.”

  “Not much,” said Morgan cheerfully.

  “What, dear?”

  “There’s not much I could accomplish. What do you imagine I’d be doing instead?”

  “Oh, why … just attending to things. I mean, attending to where you belong.” She turned t
o Emily. “There’s nothing wrong with a hardware store. Is there? My family’s always done well in hardware; it’s nothing to be sneezed at. But Uncle Ollie says Morgan’s heart’s not in it. What’s the good of a store, he says, where you have to positively wrest the merchandise from the manager? Assuming you can find the manager. I tell Uncle Ollie, ‘Oh, leave him alone. Cullen Hardware is not the be-all and end-all,’ I tell him, but it’s true that Morgan could get more narrowed in. He doesn’t know how to say no. He never refuses to be swept along.”

  “Mostly it’s muscles,” Morgan said.

  This must have been something he’d told her before; Bonny rolled her eyes at Emily. Morgan turned to Emily and repeated it. “It’s a matter of muscles,” he said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “A matter of following where they lead me. Have you ever gone out to the kitchen, say, and then forgotten what for? You stand in the kitchen and try to remember. Then your wrist makes a little twisting motion. Oh, yes! you say. That twist is what you’d do to turn a faucet on. You must have come for water! I just trust my muscles, you see, to tell me what I’m here for. To drop me into my true activity one day. I let them lead me.”

  “He lets them lead him into saying he’s a glass-blower,” Bonny said, “and a tugboat captain for the Curtis Bay Towing Company, and a Mohawk Indian high-rise worker. And that’s just what I happen to hear; heaven knows what more there is.” Her lips twitched, as if she were hiding some amusement. “You’re walking down the street with him and this total stranger asks him when the International Brotherhood of Magicians is meeting next. You’re listening to a politician’s speech and suddenly you notice Morgan on the platform, sitting beside a senator’s wife with a carnation in his buttonhole. You’re waiting for your crabs at Lexington Market and who’s behind the counter but Morgan in a rubber apron, telling the other customers where he caught such fine oysters. It seems he has this boat that was handed down from an uncle on his mother’s side, a little bateau with no engine—”

  “Engines disturb the beds,” said Morgan. “And I don’t like mechanical tonging rigs, either. What was good enough for my uncle on my mother’s side is good enough for me, I say.”

  Bonny smiled at him and shook her head. “You step out for two minutes to buy milk, leaving him safe home in his pajamas, and coming back you pass him on the corner in a satin cap and purple satin shirt, telling four little boys the secret that made him the only undefeated jockey in the history of Pimlico. A jockey, six feet tall! Why do they all believe him? He never used a crop, you see, but only whispered in the horse’s ear. He whispered something that sounded like a crop. What was the word?”

  “Scintillate,” Morgan said.

  “Oh, yes,” said Bonny. She laughed.

  Morgan trotted in his chair, holding imaginary reins. “Scintillate, scintillate,” he whispered, and Bonny laughed harder and wiped her eyes.

  “He’s impossible,” she told Emily. “He’s just … impossible to predict, you see.”

  “I can imagine he must be,” Emily said politely.

  She was beginning to like Bonny (her pink, merry face, and the helpless way she sank back in her chair), but she thought less of Morgan. It had never occurred to her that he knew exactly how people saw him, and that he enjoyed their astonishment and perhaps even courted it. She frowned at him. Morgan pulled his nose reflectively.

  “She’s right,” he said. “I make things difficult. But I plan to change. Hear that, Bonny?”

  “Oh, do you, now?” Bonny said. She stood up to raise the kitchen window. “I don’t know what to make of my garden,” she said, looking out at the yard. “I was certain I’d planted vegetables someplace, but it seems to be coming up all flowers.”

  “I mean it,” Morgan said. He told Emily, “She doesn’t believe me. Bonny, don’t you see what’s here in front of you? Here’s Emily Meredith; I brought her home. I brought her to our house. I told her and Leon, both, exactly who I was. I told about you and the girls. They know about Amy’s new baby and the time Kate smashed the car.”

  “Is that right?” Bonny asked Emily.

  Emily nodded.

  “Well, I can’t think what for,” Bonny said. “I can’t think why he bored you with all that.”

  “I’m combining my worlds!” Morgan said, and he raised his coffee cup to Bonny.

  But Bonny said, “There’s a catch to it somewhere. There’s something missing. I don’t understand what he wants.”

  Emily didn’t understand either. She shook her head; Bonny shook hers. In fact, it seemed that Bonny and Emily were the old friends and Morgan was the newcomer. He sat slightly apart, perched under his helmet like an elf under a mushroom, turning his face from one to the other while the women watched, narrow-eyed, to see what he was up to.

  1975

  1

  Even when Morgan fell asleep, he didn’t truly lose consciousness. Part of him slept while the rest of him stayed alert and jittery, counting things—thumbtacks, mattress buttons, flowers on a daughter’s dress, holes in a pegboard display of electrical fittings. A plumber came in and ordered some pipes: six elbows and a dozen nipples. “Certainly,” said Morgan, but he couldn’t help laughing. Then he was competing in a singing contest. He was singing a song from the fifties called “Moments to Remember.” He knew the words, but was unable to pronounce them properly. The ballroom prize we almost won came out the barroom brawl we almost won. His partner was not a good dancer anyway, and in fact they were nowhere close to winning. Why! His partner was Laura Lee Keller, the very first girl he had ever loved—someone he had lost track of long, long before the days of “Moments to Remember.” After the prom, he and Laura Lee had driven to the beach with half the senior class and lain kissing on a blanket by the ocean. Still, even now, even after all these years, the sound of the ocean reminded him of possibilities unfolding: everything new and untried yet, just around the corner. He opened his eyes and heard the ocean just a few blocks distant, the very same ocean he’d lain beside with Laura Lee, but he himself was middle-aged and irritable and so was Laura Lee, he supposed, wherever she was; and his mouth had a scorched taste from smoking too much the night before.

  It was six o’clock in the morning in Bethany Beach, Delaware, in the buckling tarpaper cottage they rented from Uncle Ollie every July. Tongue-and-groove walls, painted a dingy blue too long ago, rose high above the swaybacked bed. A tattered yellow shade rustled in the window. (Where else but near the ocean would you see this kind of window—the cheap aluminum frame stippled by salt air, the bellying screen as soft and sleazy as some synthetic fabric? Where else would the screen doors and porches have those diagonal wooden insets at the corners, so that no right angles appeared to exist within earshot of the Atlantic?) The room was full of castoffs: a looming wardrobe faced with a flecked, metallic mirror; a bow-fronted bureau topped with a mended dresser scarf (every one of the drawers stuck, and several of the cut-glass knobs were missing); a pink shag rug as thin and wrinkled as a bathmat; and a piecrust table beside the bed with a cracked brown plastic clock radio on the doily at its center. Morgan sat up and switched on the radio. He had just missed the Six O’Clock Sermonette; Guy and Ralna were singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Next to him, Bonny stirred and said, “Morgan? What on earth …?”

  He lowered the volume a little. He inched out of bed, took a sombrero from the wardrobe, and put it on without looking in the mirror. Barefoot, in his underpants, he slogged down the hall to the kitchen. Already the air was so warm and heavy that he felt used up.

  The cottage had four bedrooms, but only three were occupied. His mother slept in the second and Kate, their last remaining child, in the third. It used to be that the place was overflowing. The girls would share beds and couches; Brindle roomed with Louisa; various daughters’ boyfriends lined up in sleeping bags out on the porch. Morgan had complained of the confusion at the time, but now he missed it. He wondered what point there was in coming any more. Kate was hardly pr
esent—she was eighteen years old now, busy with her own affairs, forever off visiting friends in the ugly new condominium south of town. As for Louisa, the trip seemed to shake her memory loose; she was even more dislocated than usual. Only Bonny appeared to enjoy herself. She padded along the shoreline with a bucket, hunting shells. The bridge of her nose developed a permanent pink, peeling patch. Sometimes she sat at the edge of the breakers and dabbled like a child, with her legs in a V—a rash of red on top, pale underneath. Then Morgan would pace the sand just behind her with his thumbs hooked in the waistband of his trunks, braving the sun and the sticky spray, for he was never comfortable when a member of his family was in the water. He considered swimming (like sailing, like skiing) to be unnatural, a rich person’s contrivance to fill up empty hours. Although he could swim himself (a taut, silent breast stroke, with his mouth tightly closed, not wetting so much as the tip of his beard), he would never swim just for pleasure. And he would surely never swim in the ocean. His distrust of the ocean was logical and intelligent, he felt. He kept sensibly away from the edge, wearing stout shoes and woolen socks at all times. He only listened to the breakers, and plummeted into a deep, slow trance where once again he lay with Laura Lee Keller on a blanket beneath the stars.

  It was too hot for coffee, but he’d get a headache if he tried to do without it. He made instant, using water straight from the tap. Beneath the taste of Maxwell House and sugar he caught the thick, dark taste of beach water, but he drank it anyway, from a jelly-glass painted with clowns. Then he rinsed the glass. Then he took Bonny’s purse from the kitchen table and put it in the freezing compartment of the refrigerator. (Another folly of rich people was their belief that in resort towns, crime does not exist. Morgan knew better. He sensed danger all around, and would have felt more secure in the heart of Baltimore.)

  He went back to the bedroom and found Bonny sitting against her pillow. “What are you up so early for?” she asked him. “And why was the radio on?”