Morgan's Passing Read online

  He began reflecting on Joshua Bennett, a new neighbor back in Baltimore. This Bennett was an antique dealer. (Now, there was an occupation.) He looked like Henry the Eighth and he lived a gentlemanly life—eating small, expensive suppers, then reading leather-bound history books while twirling a snifter of brandy. Early last spring, when Bennett first moved in, Morgan had paid a call on him and found him in a maroon velvet smoking jacket with quilted satin lapels. (Where would one go to buy a smoking jacket?) Bennett had somehow received the impression that Morgan had descended from an ancient Baltimore shipping family and owned an atticful of antique bronzes, and he had been most cordial—offering Morgan some of his brandy and an ivory-tipped cigar. Morgan wondered if Bennett would have accepted an invitation to the beach. He began plotting his return to Baltimore: the friendship he would strike up, the conversations they would have. He could hardly wait to get back.

  Meanwhile the weekend dragged on.

  Kate had disgraced the family, Bonny said. Now she was on the police files, marked for life. Bonny seemed to take this very seriously. (Her sunburn gave her a hectic, intense look.) Because the cottage had no telephone, the Ocean City police had had to call the Bethany police and have them notify the Gowers. Naturally, therefore, the news would be everywhere now. Saturday, at breakfast, Bonny laid a blazing hand on Louisa’s arm and asked Kate, “How do you think your grandma feels? Her late husband’s name, which up till now has been unbesmirched.” Morgan had never heard her use the word “unbesmirched” before, and he wasn’t even sure that it existed. He took some time thinking it over. Louisa, meanwhile, went on calmly spooning grapefruit. “What do you say, Mother?” Bonny asked her.

  Louisa peered out of her sunken eyes and said, “Well, I don’t know what all the fuss is about. We used to give little babies marijuana any old time. It soothed their teething.”

  “No, no, Mother, that was belladonna,” Bonny said.

  Kate merely looked bored. Brindle blew her nose. The Merediths sat in a row and watched, like members of a jury.

  And on the beach—where the ocean curled and flattened beneath a deep blue bowl of sky, and gulls floated overhead as slow as sails—this group was a motley scramble of blankets, thermoses, sandy towels, an umbrella that bared half its spokes every time the wind flapped past, a squawking radio, and scattered leaves of newspaper. Kate, who had been grounded for the rest of her vacation, flipped angrily through Seventeen. Bonny sweated and shivered in layers of protective garments. The white zinc oxide on her nose and lower lip, along with her huge black sunglasses, gave her the look of some insect creature from a science-fiction movie. Gina dug a hole in the sand and climbed into it. Billy and Priscilla made a spectacle of themselves, lying too close together on their blanket.

  And Emily, in an unbecoming pale blue swimsuit that exposed her thin, limp legs, took pictures that were going to turn out poorly, but she would not yield her camera to Morgan. She worried that he would snap her, she said. Morgan swore he wouldn’t. (She was already pasted in his mind as he would like her to be forever-wearing her liquid black skirt and ballet slippers. He would surely not choose to record this other self she had become.) “All I want to do,” he told her, “is photograph some groups. Some action, don’t you see.” He couldn’t bear her finicky delays, the stylized poses she insisted on. Morgan himself was a photographer of great speed and dash; he caught people in clumps, in mid-motion, mid-laugh. Emily picked her way across the sand to one person at a time, stopping every step or so to shake her white feet fastidiously, and then she would take an eternity getting things just right, squinting through the camera, squinting at the sky—as if there were anything that could be done, any adjustments at all to aid a Kodak Instamatic. “Be still, now,” she would tell her subject, but then she’d wait so long that whoever it was grew strained and artificial-looking, and more than once Morgan cried, “Just take it, dammit!” Then Emily lowered her camera and turned, eyes widening, lips parting, and had to begin all over again.

  Sunday afternoon the Merediths had a quarrel about when they were going home. Emily wanted to wait till Monday, but Leon wanted to leave that evening. “Lord, yes,” Morgan longed to say. “Go!”—not only to the Merediths but to everyone. They could abandon him on the beach. Fall would come and he’d be buried under drifting threads of sand and a few brown leaves blown seaward. He pictured how calm he would grow, at last. The breakers would act for him, tumbling about while he lay still. He would finally have a chance to sort himself out. It was people who disarranged his life—Louisa in her striped beach robe like a hawk-nosed Bedouin, Brindle in an old stretched swimsuit of Bonny’s that fell in vacant folds around her hunched body. He sat beneath the umbrella in his sombrero and trunks and his shoes with woolen socks. His bare chest felt itchy and sticky. He chewed a match and listened to the Merediths quarrel.

  Leon said that if they left Monday, they might very well miss their show. Emily said it was only a puppet show. Leon asked how she could say only. Wasn’t it what she’d set her heart on, dragged him into, held his nose to—damn puppets with their silly grins—all these years? She said she had never held his nose to anything and, anyway, it was Leon’s business what he did with his life. She had certainly not forced him into this, she said. Then Leon jumped to his feet and went striding southward, toward town. Morgan watched after him, idly observing that Leon had developed a roll of padded flesh above the waistband of his trunks. He was a solid, weighty man now, and came down hard on his heels. Flocks of slender girls parted to let him pass. He pushed on through them, not giving them a glance.

  Possibly, Billy and Priscilla were quarreling too, for they sat apart from each other and Billy drew deep circles in the sand between his feet. The women melted closer together; the men remained on the outskirts, each alone, stiff-necked. The women’s soft voices wove in with the rush of the ocean. “Look at the birds,” Emily told Gina. “Look how they circle. Look how they’re hunting for fish.”

  “Or maybe they’re just cooling off their under-wings,” Louisa said.

  Bonny, gazing at the horizon from behind her dark glasses, spoke in a tranquil, faraway voice. “It was here on this beach,” she said, “that I first knew I was a grownup. I had thought of myself as a girl for so long—years after I was married. I was twenty-nine, pregnant with the twins. I’d brought Amy and Jeannie to the beach to play. I saw the lifeguard look over at me and then at some spot beyond me, and I realized he hadn’t really seen me at all. His mind told him, ‘Lady. Children. Sand toys,’ and he passed on. Oh, it’s not as if I were ever the kind that boys would whistle at. It’s not as if I were used to hordes of men admiring me, even back when I was in my teens. But at least, you see, I had once been up for consideration, and now I wasn’t. I was reclassified. I felt so sad. I felt I’d had something taken away from me that I was so certain of, I hadn’t even noticed I had it. I didn’t know it would happen to me too, just to anyone else.”

  Morgan noticed someone walking toward them: a man in a business suit that was made of some dull gray hammered-metal fabric. Everyone he passed stared after him for a moment. He ruffled their faces like a wind, and then they turned away again. It was Robert Roberts. Morgan said, “Brindle.” Brindle seemed to comprehend everything, just from the sound of her name. She hunched tighter on her blanket and hugged her knees and frowned, not looking. It was up to Morgan. He rose and spat his match out. “Why, Robert Roberts!” he said, and offered his hand, too soon. Robert had some distance to travel yet. He came lurching up the slope a little untidily, in order not to keep Morgan waiting. His palm was damp. His face glistened. He was a man without visible edges or angles, and his thin brown hair was parted close to the center and plastered down. It appeared that he was sinking into the sand. There was sand across the creases of his shoes, and more sand filling his trouser cuffs. He gripped Morgan’s hand like a drowning man and stared fixedly into his eyes—but that was his salesman’s training, no doubt.

  “It’s Bob,” he said, pan
ting.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “I’m Bob. You always call me Robert Roberts, like a joke.”

  “I do?”

  “I came for Brindle.”

  Morgan turned to Brindle. She hugged her knees harder and rocked, staring out to sea.

  “It’s the same thing all over, isn’t it?” Robert said to Morgan. “It’s the same old story. Once again she leaves me.”

  “Ah, well … have a seat, Robert, Bob. Don’t be such a stranger.”

  Robert ignored him. “Brindle,” he said, “I woke up Thursday morning and you were gone. I thought maybe you were just miffed about something, but it’s been four days now and you never came back. Brindle, are we going round and round like this all our lives? We’re together, you leave me, we’re together, you leave me?”

  “You do still have my photograph,” Brindle told the ocean.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Brindle got to her feet. She brushed sand off the seat of her bathing suit; she adjusted a strap. Then she went up to Robert Roberts and set her face so close to his that he drew back. “Look,” she said, tapping her yellow cheekbone. “This is me. I am Brindle Gower Teague Roberts. All that string of names.”

  “Yes, Brindle, of course,” Robert said.

  “You say that so easily! But since you and I were children, I’ve been married and widowed. I married old Horace Teague next door and moved into his rowhouse; I bought little cans of ham in the gourmet sections of department stores—”

  “You’ve told me all that, Brindle.”

  “I am not the girl in the photograph.”

  She was not. The skin below her eyes was the same damaged color as Morgan’s. The dimple in one cheek had become a dry crack—something Morgan had never noticed. She was thirty-eight years old. Morgan stroked his beard.

  “Brindle, what is it you’re saying?” Robert Roberts asked. “Are you saying you don’t love me any more?”

  In the little group of women (all gazing politely in other directions) there was the softest rustle, like a laugh or a sigh. Robert looked over at them. Then he turned to Morgan. “What is she saying?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Morgan.

  Louisa said, “If they marry, I hope I won’t be sent to live with them.”

  “They are married, Mother dear,” Morgan told her.

  “You have no idea how hard it is,” Louisa said, “not knowing where you’ll be shipped to next.”

  “Mother, have we ever shipped you anywhere? Ever in all your life?”

  “Haven’t you?” she asked. She considered, retreating into the hood of her beach robe. “Well, somehow it feels like you have, at least,” she said. “No, I prefer to stay on with you. Bonny, you won’t let him send me off to Brindle’s, will you? Morgan’s difficult to live with but … eventful, I suppose you’d say.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Bonny dryly.

  “Promise?”

  “Mother,” said Morgan. “They’re married. They’re already married, and no one’s shipped you anywhere. Tell her, Brindle. Tell her, Robert, Bob …”

  But Robert faced the sea, not listening. His hair blew up stiffly, in spikes, which made him look desperate. While the others watched, he bent to dust the sand from his trousers. He pulled his shirtcuffs a proper length below the sleeves of his coat. Then he started walking toward the water.

  He circled a child with a shovel and he stepped over a moat and a crenellated wall. But his powers of observation seemed to weaken as he drew nearer the sea, and he stumbled into a shallow basin that three little boys were digging. He climbed out again, ignoring their cries. Now his trouser legs were dark and sugary-looking. He accidentally crushed a paper cup beneath his heel. He reached the surf and kept going. A young man, lifting a screaming girl in the air and preparing to dunk her, suddenly set her down and stood gaping. Robert was knee-deep in seething white water. He was waist-deep. When the breakers curled back for a new assault, he was seen to be clothed in heavy, dragging vestments that looked almost Biblical.

  Up until now, no one had moved. They might have been little specks of bathers on a postcard. But then Brindle screamed, “Stop him!” and all the women clambered to their feet. The lifeguard stood on his high wooden chair, with a whistle raised halfway to his mouth. Billy barreled past. Morgan hadn’t even heard him get up. Morgan threw his sombrero into Bonny’s lap and followed, but the lifeguard was faster than both of them. By the time Billy and Morgan hit the water, the lifeguard was in to waist level, heaving his orange torpedo at Robert. Robert brushed it away and plunged on.

  A breaker crashed around Morgan’s knees, colder than he had expected. He hated the feeling of wet woolen socks. However, he kept going. What he had in mind was not so much rescuing Robert as defeating him. No, Robert would never get away with this; he couldn’t escape so easily; it must not be allowed. Morgan swarmed in the water, his limbs wandering off in several directions. A surprised-looking woman lifted both flaps of her bathing cap and stared. The lifeguard took a stranglehold on Robert from behind, and Robert (who so far had not even got his hair wet) flailed and fell backward. He was engulfed by a wave and came up coughing, still in the lifeguard’s grasp. The lifeguard hauled him in. Morgan followed with his arms out level, his head lunging forward intently. The lifeguard dragged Robert up on the sand and dumped him there, like a bundle of wet laundry. He prodded Robert with one long, bronzed foot. “Oh, me,” Morgan said wearily, and he sat down beside Robert and looked at his ruined shoes. Billy sank next to him, out of breath. Robert went on coughing and shrugging off the people who crowded around. “Stand back, stand back,” the lifeguard said. He asked Morgan, “What was he, drunk?”

  “I wouldn’t have the faintest idea,” Morgan said.

  “Well, I got to make a report on this.”

  “Really, that won’t be necessary,” Morgan said, rising. “I’m from the Bureau.”

  “The what?”

  “Parks and Safety,” Morgan said. “What’s your name, son? Of course I plan to mention this to the board.”

  “Well, Hendrix,” the lifeguard said. “Danny Hendrix, with an x.”

  “Good work, Hendrix,” Morgan said. He briskly shook the lifeguard’s hand. The lifeguard stood around a minute, scratching his head, and then he went down to the water to watch his orange torpedo float out to sea.

  They propped Robert up and draped him across their shoulders—one arm circling Morgan’s neck, one arm circling Billy’s. Robert seemed uninjured, but he was heavy and lethargic and his shoes dragged behind him. “Come on, fellow,” Billy said cheerfully. He looked pleased; perhaps he was reminded of his fraternity days, which he’d once told Morgan were the happiest of his life. Morgan himself stayed silent. He wished he had a cigarette.

  They hauled Robert past the blanket, where the women were packing their belongings. Brindle was smoothing out towels and folding them. She would not look at Robert. Morgan felt proud of her. Let Robert see whom he was dealing with here! Let him see how they could handle it—all of them together. For this was no mere marital quarrel, no romantic tiff. No, plainly what had happened was a comment upon their whole family—on the disarray of their family life. Robert had been standing right beside this blanket, had he not, listening to Louisa forget where she was in time, Morgan arguing with her, all the others grouping into battle squads … and then he’d made his break, escaped. The scoundrel. He’d insulted every one of them, each and every one. Morgan felt a flash of anger. Pretending to be concerned about Hendrix, he stopped without warning and ducked away from Robert’s arm and turned toward the ocean. Robert tilted and nearly fell. Morgan shaded his eyes. Hendrix was sending signals to the lifeguard on the next beach. Morgan could not read signal flags, but he could easily imagine the conversation that was taking place, WHAT WAS PROBLEM, the neighbor would ask, and Hendrix would answer, MIXUP CHAOS MUDDLE …

  Kate was watching too. (No doubt she found Hendrix handsome.) Morgan said, “Can you tell what
he’s saying?”

  She shrugged. “It’s just the clear sign,” she said.

  “The what?”

  “You know—all clear, everything in order.”

  “Little does he know,” Morgan said.

  9

  Bonny told Morgan they were running out of beds. Were the Merediths leaving tonight or tomorrow morning? she asked him. This conversation took place in the kitchen, late in the afternoon, while Bonny was emptying ice-cube trays into a pitcher. Above the crackle and clink of ice, she whispered that it would certainly solve a great deal if the Merediths left before bedtime. Then she could put Brindle and Robert in their room. But Morgan didn’t think Brindle would want to share a room with Robert anyhow. “Let it be, Bonny,” he said. “Send Robert out on the porch with a sleeping bag.”

  “But, Morgan, they’re married.”

  “The man’s a lunatic. She’s better off without him.”

  “You’re the one who was against her leaving him,” Bonny said. “Now, just because he walks into the surf a ways—”

  “With all his clothes on. With his suit on. Making us look like some kind of institutional outing, a laughingstock …”

  “Nobody laughed,” Bonny said.

  “It’s a mark of how badly this vacation is going,” Morgan said, “that, lately, I’ve been wondering how the hardware store is doing.”

  “He was just showing her he cared,” said Bonny.

  “I’ve half a mind to call Butkins in the morning and see if he’s restocked those leaf bags yet. With fall coming on—”

  “What are you talking about? It’s July.”

  Morgan pulled at his nose.

  “Go ask Emily what they’ve decided,” Bonny said.

  “You want me to tell them to leave?”

  “No, no, just ask. If they’re staying on, we’ll work out something else.”

  “Maybe we could leave,” he said hopefully. “The others could stay and we could go.”