Morgan's Passing Read online

  “Well, I for one have work to do,” Leon said, rising.

  But Emily told Morgan, “I know what you mean.”

  I wish I knew, was what she should have said.

  His manners were atrocious (she often thought); he smoked too much and suffered from a chronic cough that would surely be the death of him, ate too many sweets (and exposed a garble of black fillings whenever he opened his mouth), scattered ashes down his front, chewed his cuticles, picked his teeth, meddled with his beard, fidgeted, paced, scratched his stomach, hummed distractingly whenever it was someone else’s turn to speak; he was not a temperate person. He wore rich men’s hand-me-downs, stained and crumpled and poorly kept, and over them an olive-drab, bunchy nylon parka, its hood trimmed with something matted that might be monkey fur. He smelled permanently of stale tobacco. When he wore glasses, they were so fingerprinted and greasy you couldn’t read his eyes. He was excitable and unpredictable, sometimes nearly manic, and while it was kind of him to manage their affairs, the fact was that he could often become … well, presumptuous was the word—pushy, managerial, bending the Merediths to his conception of them, which was not remotely rooted in reality, taking too much for granted, assuming what he should not have assumed. He talked too much and too erratically, or grew stuffy and bored them with lengthy accounts of human-interest items from the paper, grandchildren’s clever remarks, and Consumer Reports ratings; while at moments when he should have been sociable—when the Merediths had other guests, at their Halloween party, for instance—he would as likely as not clam up completely and stand around in some corner with his hands jammed deep in his pockets and a glum expression on his face. And his parties! Well, the less said, the better. Combining garbage men with philosophy professors, seating small children next to priests with hearing aids …

  But once, passing a bookstore, Emily happened to notice a blown-up photo of the first successful powered flight, and the sight of Wilbur Wright poised on the sand at Kitty Hawk—capped and suited, strangely stylish, suspended forever in that tense, elated, ready position—reminded her for some reason of Morgan, and she suddenly felt that she had never given him full credit. And another time, when she switched on a cassette tape to see if it were the music for “Hansel and Gretel,” she found that Morgan must have been playing with it, for his gruff, bearded voice leaped forth, disguised in a German accent. “Nu? Vhere is de button?” he said, and then she heard a Japanese “Ah so!” and two clicks, where he must have pressed the button off and on again. “Tum, te-tum,” he said, singing tunelessly, rustling cellophane. There was the sound of a match being struck. He blew a long puff of air. “Naughty boy, Pinocchio!” he said in a chirping voice. “I see you’ve been untruthful again. Your nose has grown seven inches!” Then he gave his smoker’s laugh, breathy and wheezing, “Heh, heh,” descending into a cough. But Emily didn’t laugh with him. She listened intently, with her forehead creased. She bent very close to the machine, unsmiling, trying to figure him out.

  6

  She and Leon were invited to the Percy School’s Thanksgiving Festival, where they’d never been before. She wasn’t sure what show they should put on. “Rapunzel”? “Thumbelina”? Late one afternoon, just a few days before the Festival, she took Rapunzel from her muslin bag and propped her on the kitchen table. Rapunzel had not been used for a while and had an unkempt, neglected look. Her long, long braids had grown frazzled. “I suppose I should make her another wig,” Emily told Gina. Gina was doing her homework; all she said was, “Mmm.”

  But then Leon came in and said, “Rapunzel? What’s she doing here?”

  “I thought we’d take her to the Festival.”

  “Last night you said we’d do ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ ”

  “I did?”

  “I suggested ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and you said that would be fine.”

  “How could I have?” Emily asked. “We can’t give ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ There are thirteen fairies. Not even counting the king, the queen, the princess …”

  “I said, ‘Emily, why not let’s do something different for a change?’ and you said, ‘All right, Leon—’ ”

  “But never ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ ” Emily said.

  “I said, ‘How about “Sleeping Beauty”?’ and you said, ‘All right, Leon.’ ”

  He was making it up. Except that Leon never made things up. There was no way Emily could have held that conversation, not even half asleep. Why, if you counted the old woman at the spinning wheel, Prince Charming … It was out of the question. They couldn’t begin to handle a cast of that size. She considered the possibility that he had discussed the subject with someone else, mistakenly. They always seemed to miss connections these days. They started every morning so courteous, so hopeful, but deteriorated rapidly and ended up, at night, sleeping with their backs to each other on the outermost edges of the bed.

  She noticed that two vertical grooves had started to appear in Leon’s cheeks. They were not so much lines as hollows, such as you would see in a man who habitually kept his jaw set too far forward.

  Then he said, “How about taking Gina? She could work some of the fairies.”

  “But it’s on Wednesday afternoon,” Emily said. “Gina would still be in school.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind missing school,” Gina said.

  Emily suspected she was only trying to keep peace. Gina loved school. “Well, I mind,” Emily told her.

  “Oh, Mama.”

  “And thirteen fairies! Even if we owned that many, how would just one more pair of hands help run them all?”

  “We could bring them on a few at a time, maybe,” Leon said.

  Emily started pacing around the table. Gina and Leon watched her. Gina chewed a pencil and swung her feet, but Leon stayed motionless. Then Emily wheeled on him and said, “Are you doing this on purpose?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I mean, is this supposed to prove something, Leon? Are you just trying to show me I’m … oh, set in my ways? You want me to say I refuse to give a play with eighteen puppets in it, and my daughter playing hooky, and that will mean I’m rigid, narrow-minded?”

  “All I know is, I said, ‘How about “Sleeping Beauty,” Emily—’ ”

  “You never did.”

  Leon closed his mouth, shrugged, and walked out of the room. Emily looked over at Gina, who was watching, but Gina abruptly stopped chewing her pencil and buried herself in her homework.

  Then Emily took her coat from the hook in the hall and left the apartment, jabbing her arms into her sleeves as she stalked down the stairs. It was late enough so the smell of different suppers had begun to fill the stairwell: cabbage, green peppers, oil—stifling smells. Crafts Unlimited was already dark and dead-looking. She slammed out into the street. Twilight had drained the color from the buildings. An old woman paused on the corner to set down all her bundles and rearrange them. Emily swerved around her, keeping her fists knotted in her coat pockets. She crossed against a red light and walked very fast.

  He was impossible. There was no hope for either of them. She had locked herself in permanently with someone she couldn’t bear.

  She passed a boy and girl who were standing in the center of the sidewalk, holding hands, the girl pivoting on her heels and giving the boy a shy smile. It was heartbreaking. She would have stopped to set them straight, but of course they wouldn’t believe her; they imagined they were going to do everything differently. She met a child, some friend of Gina’s. “Hello, Mrs. Meredith.” “Hello, um, Polly,” she said—motherly, matronly, indistinguishable from any other woman.

  Sometimes she thought the trouble was, she and Leon were too well acquainted. The most innocent remark could call up such a string of associations, so many past slights and insults never quite settled or forgotten, merely smoothed over. They could no longer have a single uncomplicated feeling about each other.

  Then she heard footsteps behind her. They kept coming. She slowed, and the corners of her mouth started turning up w
ithout her say-so, but when she looked back it was no one she knew—a man on his way to someplace in a hurry. He kept his face buried in his collar. She let him pass her. Then she looked back again. But no matter how long she stood watching, the sidewalk was empty.

  She took a right on Meller Street and walked with more purpose. She crossed another street and turned left. Now there was a stream of people bundled up, intent, rushing home to supper. It occurred to her that Cullen Hardware might be closed by now. She slowed, frowning. But no, its windows were still lit with that faded light that always seemed filmed by dust. She pushed through the door. Butkins was bent over a sheet of paper at the counter. “Has Morgan gone home?” she asked him.

  Butkins straightened and passed a hand across his high forehead. “Oh. Mrs. Meredith,” he said. (He was so determinedly formal, though she’d known him for years.) “No, he’s up in his office.” he said.

  She headed down an aisle of snow shovels and sidewalk salt, and climbed the steps at the rear. Every board whined beneath her feet. On the landing, Morgan’s office seemed unusually still—no sawing, hammering, drilling, no flurry of wood chips. Morgan was lying on the maroon plush sofa. He was hatless, for once, and wore a satin-lapeled smoking jacket that very nearly matched the sofa. His hair looked flat and thin. His face was a pale glimmer in the dusk. “Morgan? Are you sick?” Emily asked.

  “I have a cold,” he said.

  “Oh, just a cold,” she said, relieved. She took off her coat and laid it on the desk.

  “Just a cold! How can you say that?” he asked her. His energy seemed to be returning. He sat up, indignant. “Do you have any idea how I feel? My head is like a beachball. This morning I had a temperature of ninety-nine point nine, and last night it was a hundred and one. I lay awake all night, and had fever dreams.”

  “You can’t do both,” Emily said. “Lie awake, and dream as well.”

  “Why not?” he asked her.

  He always had to throw his whole self into things—even into illness. His office looked like a hospital room. A Merck Manual lay open on the filing cabinet, and his desk was a jumble of medicines and cloudy drinking glasses. On the floor beside the couch were a bottle of cough syrup, a sticky teaspoon, and a cardboard box spilling papers. She bent to pick up one of the papers. It was a photograph of the oldest, homeliest washing machine she’d ever laid eyes on, the kind with a wringer attached. Model 504A, she read, can easily be connected to any existing … She replaced the paper and sat down in the swivel chair at the desk. Morgan sneezed.

  “Maybe you ought to be home in bed,” she told him.

  “I can’t rest at home. It’s a madhouse there. Liz is still flat on her back trying to hang on to that baby. She gets the wicker breakfast tray; I end up with the tin meat platter. And people have already started arriving for Thanksgiving.”

  Butkins called something. Morgan said, “Eh?”

  “I’ll be going now, Mr. Gower.”

  “He ought to know I can’t hear a thing with this cold,” Morgan told Emily.

  “He says he’s going,” Emily said. “Do you want me to help lock up?”

  “Oh, thank you. It’s true that I’m not myself.”

  But he went on sitting there, blotting his nose with a handkerchief. Emily heard the front door shutting behind Butkins.

  “When Butkins leaves the store,” Morgan said, “I sometimes wonder if he dematerializes. Ever thought of that?”

  She smiled. He watched her soberly, not smiling himself. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  What? Nothing,” Emily said.

  “The tip of your nose is white.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Don’t lie to me,” he said. “I’ve known you nine years. When the tip of your nose is white, something’s wrong. It’s Leon, I suppose.”

  “He thinks I’m narrow-minded,” Emily said.

  Morgan sneezed again.

  “He thinks I’m rigid, but he’s the one. He never tries out for plays now, and that gospel-troupe man is still after us but Leon won’t even talk to him. I’m getting claustrophobic. I can’t drive after dark any more because the space is too small—you know, the lighted space the car travels in. I think I must be going crazy from irritation, just from little petty nameless irritations. Then he says that I’m the one who’s narrow.”

  Morgan shook a cigarette from an unfamiliar green pack. “See? We’d better elope,” he said.

  “Do you think you ought to be smoking?”

  “Oh, these are all right. They’re menthol.”

  He lit up and started coughing. He stumbled to his feet, as if reaching for more air, and wandered around the office, coughing and thumping his chest. Between gasps, he said, “Emily, you know I’m always here for you.”

  “You want some Robitussin, Morgan?”

  He shook his head, gave a final cough, and settled on his desk top. Medicine bottles clinked all around him. Emily wheeled her chair back slightly to allow him more room. His socks, she saw, were translucent black silk, and he wore pointy black patent-leather slippers that reminded her of Fred Astaire. He was sitting on her coat, rumpling it, but she decided not to point that out.

  “I know you must find me laughable,” he told her.

  “Oh, well, I wouldn’t say laughable, really—”

  “But I’m serious,” he said. “Let’s stop fooling, Emily. I love you.”

  He slid off his desk, disentangling himself with difficulty from her coat, which had somehow twisted itself around one of his legs. Emily stood up. (What did he have in mind?) He was, after all, a grown man, real, lean-bodied. The hunger with which he drew on his cigarette caused her to step behind her chair. But he went on past her. He was only pacing. He walked to the railing, looked over the darkened store below him, and walked back.

  “Of course,” he said, “I don’t intend any harm to your marriage. I admire your marriage very much. I mean, in a sense, I love Leon as well, and Gina; the unit as a whole, in fact … Who is it I love? But you, Emily …”

  He flicked his ashes onto the floor. “I am fifty-one years old,” he said. “You’re what, twenty-nine or thirty. I could easily be your father. What a joke, eh? I must look ridiculous.”

  Instead he looked sad and kind, and also exhausted. Emily took a step in his direction. He circled her, musing. “I think of you as an illness,” he said. “Something recurrent, like malaria. I push the thought of you down, you see. Whole weeks go by … I imagine that I’m somehow deeper when I manage to overcome it. I feel stronger and wiser. I take some pleasure, then, in doing what I’m supposed to do. I carry the garbage out; I arrive at work on time …”

  She touched his arm. He dodged her and went on pacing, head lowered, puffing clouds of smoke.

  “I persuade myself,” he said, “that there is some virtue in the trivial, the commonplace. Ha! What a notion. I think of those things on TV, those man-in-the-street things where the ordinary triumphs. They stop some ordinary person and ask if he can sing a song, recite a poem … they stop a motorcycle gang. I’ve seen this! Black-leather motorcycle gang and ask, ‘Can you sing all the words to “Some Enchanted Evening”?’ And up these fellows start, dead serious, trying hard—I mean, fellows you would never expect had heard of ‘Some Enchanted Evening.’ They stand there with their arms around each other, switchblades poking out of their pockets, brass knuckles in their blue jeans, earnestly, sweetly singing …”

  He’d forgotten all about her. He was off on this track of his own, tearing back and forth across his office. Emily sat down on the couch and looked around her. There was a bulletin board on the wall above the filing cabinet, and it was covered with clippings and miscellaneous objects. An Adlai Stevenson button, a frowsy red feather, a snapshot of a bride, a blue silk rose … She imagined Morgan rushing in with them, the spoils of some mysterious, private war, and tacking them up, and chortling, and rushing out again. She was struck, all at once, by his separateness. He was absolutely unrelated to her. She would never re
ally understand the smallest part of him.

  “They stop this fat old lady,” he was saying. “A mess! A disaster. Gray and puffy like some failed pastry, and layers of clothes that seem to have melted together. ‘Can you sing “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over”?’ they ask, and she says, ‘Certainly,’ and starts right up, so obliging, with this shiny grin, and ends with her arms spread and this little stamp-stamp finish—”

  He bit down on his cigarette and stopped his pacing long enough to demonstrate—both hands outflung, one foot poised to stamp. “Just … because … it’s JUNE!” he sang, and he stamped his foot.

  “I love you too,” she told him.

  “JUNE!” he sang.

  He paused. He took the cigarette from his mouth.

  “Eh?” he said.

  She smiled up at him.

  He tugged his beard. He shot her a sidelong glance from under his eyebrows, and then he dropped his cigarette and slowly, meditatively ground it out with his heel. When he sat on the edge of the couch, he still seemed to be thinking something over. When he bent to kiss her, he gave off a kind of shaggy warmth, like some furred animal, and he smelled of ashes and Mentholatum.

  1977

  1

  Morgan’s daughter Liz finally, finally had her baby, on the coldest night in the coldest February anyone could remember. It was Morgan who had to get up and drive her to the hospital. Then of course her husband, Chester, arrived from Tennessee, and when Liz was released from the hospital, she and Chester and the baby stayed on in her old room a few days till Liz was strong enough to travel. Meanwhile the house filled further, like something flooding upward from the basement. Amy and Jean kept stopping by with their children, and the twins drifted in from Charlottesville, and Molly and her family from New York, and by the time Kate arrived with her boyfriend, there was nowhere to put the boyfriend but the storeroom on the third floor, underneath the eaves. This was a weekend. They’d be gone by Monday, Morgan reminded himself. He loved them all, he was crazy about them, but life was becoming a little difficult. The daughters who hadn’t got along in the past didn’t get along any better now. The new baby appeared to be the colicky type. And there was never any time to see Emily.