Morgan's Passing Read online

  “If we feed the children in the kitchen,” Bonny said, counting on her fingers, “that makes sixteen grownups in the dining room, or fifteen if Lizzie wants a tray in bed, but then the mothers would have to keep running out to check on them, so maybe we should feed the children early. But then the children would be tearing around like wild things while we were trying to eat, and I just remembered, Liz said her old college roommate was coming at seven-thirty, so we can’t eat too late, or maybe she meant she was coming for supper; do you think so? and in that case we’d be seventeen at table, assuming Liz does not want a tray in bed, and naturally she wouldn’t if her roommate’s eating downstairs, but we only have service for sixteen; so we’ll have to divide it up, say you and me and Brindle and your mother in the first shift and then the girls and their husbands and … oh, dear, David is Jewish, I think. Is it all right I’m serving ham?”

  “Who’s David?” Morgan asked.

  “Katie’s boyfriend, Morgan. Pay attention. This is really very simple.”

  Then after supper one of the grandsons either broke a toe or didn’t break a toe, no one could be sure, though everyone agreed that broken toes required no splints anyhow, so there wasn’t much point in troubling a doctor outside office hours. Actually, Morgan would not have minded driving the boy to the hospital, which by now he could have found in his sleep. He needed air. The living room was a sea of bodies—people reading, knitting, wrestling, quarreling, playing board games, poking the fire, lolling around, yawning, discussing politics. The shades had not been drawn, and the darkness pressing in made the house seem even murkier. Louisa’s black Labrador, Harry, had chewed a Jiffy bag into little gray flecks all over the carpet.

  Morgan went upstairs to his bedroom, but two toddler girls were standing at the bureau trying on Bonny’s lipstick. “Out! Out!” he shouted. They lifted their smeared faces to him like tiny, elderly drunks, but they didn’t obey. He left, slamming the door behind him. In the hall he was hit by the lingering smell of ham, which made him feel fat. He heard the baby fussing in an edgy voice that clawed at the small of his back. “It’s too much,” he told this what’s-his-name, this David, a thin, studious young man who was just descending the third-floor stairs with a paperback book in his hand. David was too polite to say anything, but there was something about the way he fell in with Morgan, going down the next flight of stairs, that made Morgan feel he sympathized.

  Bonny was walking the baby in the entrance hall, which seemed to be the only space left. “Could you take Pammy for a while?” she asked.

  “Pammy. Ah. The baby.”

  He didn’t want her, but Bonny looked stretched and gray with fatigue. He accepted the baby in a small, warm, wilted clump. No doubt she would spit all over the shoulder of his pinstriped, head-of-the-family suit that he always wore for these occasions. “Bonny, I think we may have carried things too far, this visit,” he said.

  “Now, Morgan, you always tell me that. Then the next day after they leave you wander through the house like a dog that’s lost its puppies.”

  “Yes, but every visit there are more, you see,” he said, “and they seem to hang around for a longer spell of time.”

  Molly came through from the kitchen, carrying a bucket. “Christopher’s thrown up,” she said.

  “How does the world strike you so far?” Morgan asked the baby.

  The doorbell rang. Bonny said, “Who can that be?”

  “It must be Liz’s roommate.”

  “Morgan, honestly. Liz’s roommate is sitting in the living room.”

  “She is?”

  “She just had supper with us, Morgan.”

  Morgan opened the door, one-handed. Emily stood waiting. She landed in his vision like a pale, starry flash of light. He felt everything around him lift and brighten. “Oh,” he told her. She smiled at him. She was holding a package tied with pink yarn. (In some illogical way, it seemed the gift was for him. It seemed she was the gift.)

  Then Bonny said, “Emily!” and stepped forward to kiss her. Emily looked at Morgan over Bonny’s shoulder. Grave as a child, she drew away and turned to him and patted the baby’s bare foot.

  “She’s beautiful,” she said.

  She was gazing into his eyes.

  The baby had been cranking up to cry again, but gave a sudden hiccup and fell silent—taken aback, maybe, by the icy wind from the door, or by the touch of Emily’s cold hand. “Come on inside,” Bonny told Emily. “You must be frozen! Did you drive? Have you ever seen such weather?”

  She led Emily into the living room. Morgan followed. He felt that Emily was the single point of stillness. Everyone milled around her while she stood upright at the center. There was something wonderfully prim about the way she offered her package to Liz, as if she weren’t sure it would be accepted. But Liz was already exclaiming as she took it. (Motherhood had enlarged her, fuzzed her edges; she was a flurry of bathrobe and milky smells.) And of course she loved the lamb puppet inside. Everyone had to pass it around and try to work it. The lamb’s quilted face was nuzzled to the baby’s cheek. The baby started and batted the air with both fists. “Offer Emily a drink, will you?” Bonny told Morgan.

  Morgan stooped to lay the baby in Louisa’s lap. Louisa took her uncertainly, one gnarled hand still clutching a glass of port. “What is this?” she asked.

  “It’s a baby, Mother.”

  “Is it mine?”

  He reconsidered, took the baby back, and gave her to Brindle. Brindle was reading a mail-order catalog and passed her on to a twin. Throughout all this the baby looked better entertained than she had the whole day.

  “She’s the image of Liz,” Emily said. “Isn’t she? She’s just like her. But with Chester’s eyes.”

  “Emily, honey, where’s Leon?” Bonny asked. “And where’s Gina? Didn’t she want to see the baby?”

  “She has a science report due Monday. She’s been working on it all weekend.”

  Morgan imagined the hush in their apartment: the bare, clean living room, Gina concentrating on a single book.

  “But Leon, at least,” Bonny said. “You could have brought Leon.”

  “He wanted to watch this program on TV. If I waited till it was finished, the baby would have gone to bed, I figured.”

  Two years ago the Merediths had bought a small television set. Morgan tended to forget that. Every time Emily referred to it, he mentally blinked; he felt himself having to make some disruptive inner adjustment. He went to the sideboard and poured her a glass of sherry—the only drink she’d ever been known to ask for. When he handed it to her, she was just slipping out of her coat. “Let me hang that up,” he told her.

  “Oh, I’ll keep it. I can only stay a minute.”

  She sat on the couch, talking to Bonny and Liz, and Morgan harumphed his way around the living room. He stepped over a Monopoly game, threw another log on the fire. He wound the clock on the mantel. He squatted, grunting, and picked up the discarded paper from Emily’s gift and folded it carefully for future use. She must have decorated the paper herself, or bought it from Crafts Unlimited. It was patterned with a block print of little bells. He loved her old-time, small-town manners—her prompt gifts and cards and thank-you notes, her Christmas fruitcake, her unfailing observance of every official occasion. She was the most proper person he had ever met. (A while back, she had angled a night away from home—their one whole night together. They were so tired of snatched moments. She’d told Leon she was going to Virginia. She’d met Morgan at the Patrician Hotel and insisted on signing her true name in the register—her name and address and telephone number, all written with the pen held perpendicular to the page in a stiff, quaint manner that delighted him. He’d asked later, why not a false name? It wouldn’t be right, she had said.)

  “I parked the car at the corner,” she was telling Bonny, “and just as I got out I saw this little family. A man, a woman, two children. One of the children had fallen, he was crying, and I slowed down to check on him; you know how it is
when you hear a child cry. Well, it was only a scrape or something, a scabby knee. But evidently the father was blind. He didn’t seem to know what had happened. He just kept saying, ‘What is it, Dorothy? Dorothy, what is it? Dorothy, what’s gone wrong?’ And Dorothy wouldn’t answer. She picked up the child that was crying and then she got the older one, really much too big a child to carry, hoisted on her other hip, and she was so swaddled around with winter coats and scarves and also she had a big purse and some huge kind of tote bag, I don’t know, groceries or things; it was hard to tell by the streetlight. She was staggering, just tottering along. And he was still asking, ‘What is it?’ and feeling all around him, frantic. She said, ‘Look, you wait here, I’ve got to go bring the car. Nicholas can’t walk.’ He said, ‘Why can’t he walk? For God’s sake, what’s happened?’ and she got all exasperated and said, ‘Just wait, I tell you; keep calm. Stay right here and I’ll be back. Jason, you weigh a ton. Hang on to Mommy, Nicholas …’ I wanted to tell the man, ‘It’s a scrape. It’s nothing.’ I wanted to tell the woman, ‘Why bring the car? Why are you doing this? Or if you do have to bring the car, why not leave the children with him, and the bags and things? He can manage those. Why wade off like that, why? Why make things, oh, so ingrown, so twisted?’ ”

  “Oh, when you see how other people have such handicaps,” Bonny said, “you have to thank your stars our own lives are so easy. Don’t you?”

  She’d missed the point. So had everyone else, Morgan supposed. They went on rattling their dice, clicking their needles. A log fell in the fire, sending out a shower of sparks. The dog stirred and half-heartedly thumped his tail. Brindle turned the pages of her catalog, with its garish, blurred illustrations. Amazing Soap Cradle! Morgan read. Remarkable Perma-Tweezers! Astounding Hair Trap Saves Costly Repair Bills! He lifted his eyes and met Emily’s. She looked beautifully remote to him, so distinct from everyone else that she seemed smaller even than the children.

  Then when she had to go, it was Bonny who told Morgan to walk her to the car. Operating on her own misguided version of events, Bonny said, “Now, make sure she locks her doors, Morgan. You heard what peculiar people are running around loose.” Emily let Morgan help her into her coat, and she waved good night to the others and kissed Bonny on the cheek. “Come back on a weekday,” Bonny said. “Have lunch with me one day while Gina’s at school. It’s been so long since we’ve had lunch! What’s become of you?” Emily didn’t answer that.

  She and Morgan went down the front steps, out to the street. It was such a cold night that there was something flinty about the air, and Morgan’s heels rang as if on metal. He was bundled into his parka, with the hood up; but Emily’s coat didn’t look warm and, although she wore black tights, her papery little shoes were probably no protection at all. He took her hand. She had tiny, precise knuckles and a cluster of chilly fingers. “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” he said. “I guess you can’t get away.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Maybe Monday.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Come out at suppertime, to buy milk or something. I’ll stay on late at the store.”

  “But I’ve done that so often.”

  “He hasn’t said anything, has he?”

  “No.”

  They dropped hands, separated by that “he”—a word that pointed out their furtiveness. In private, they no longer mentioned Leon. Morgan could not picture him without an inner twinge of sorrow and remorse. It seemed he liked Leon even better than before, and appreciated more fully the sober dignity of his high-cheekboned face, which was—come to think of it—admirably stoical, like an American Indian’s. (Leon had a way of looking at Morgan, lately, with his long black eyes expressionless, lusterless, impassive.) But with Bonny, strangely enough, Morgan felt no guilt at all. He had sealed her off in another compartment. Coming home to her, he would be as pleased as ever by her easy chuckle and her heavy breasts and the absent-minded hugs she gave him as she slid past him in the choked and crowded corridors of their house.

  He and Emily reached her car. She started into the street, to the driver’s side, but he stopped her and drew her in to him. She smelled clear and fresh, like snow, and there was sherry on her breath. He kissed the curve of her jaw, just below one earlobe. “Morgan,” she whispered, “someone will see.” (She had an exaggerated fear of rumor; she imagined that people were more observant than they really were.) He felt he was trying to fill up on her. He kissed her mouth—a dry, sharp, wrinkled mouth, oddly touching—and unbuttoned her coat to slip his hands inside and circle her. Her body was so thin and pliant that it always seemed he was missing something, leaving part of it behind. “Stay longer,” he said in her ear.

  “I can’t,” she said, but she held on for a moment, and then she pulled away and ran to climb into her car. The headlights lit up. The engine coughed and started. Morgan stood watching after her, pinching his lower lip between his fingers and thinking of what he should have said: Come even if it’s Sunday. Promise you’ll come Monday. Why don’t you wear gloves? Mornings, now, when I wake up, I have this springy, hopeful feeling, and I see that everything is worth it, after all.

  2

  As soon as the weather thawed, Emily started jogging. It was a strange thing for her to do, Morgan thought—not really her type of activity. She bought a pair of clumsy yellow running shoes and a pedometer that she strapped to her waist with an old leather belt of Leon’s. Several times, when Morgan was on his way to see her, he caught sight of her approaching at the other end of the block, wearing her unrunner-like skirt from which her legs flew out like sticks. Her yellow feet seemed the biggest part of her. She always looked as if she just happened to be running—as if she had a bus to catch or had suddenly remembered a pot left boiling on the stove. Maybe it was her tripping gait, which lacked seriousness. Maybe it was the flip and swing of her skirt. As she drew near, she would call out, not breaking stride, “Be with you in a minute! Once more around the block!” But when she stopped, finally, her pedometer would surprise him: four miles. Four and a half miles. Five. Always pressing her limits.

  Once Morgan asked what she was running for.

  “I just am,” she told him.

  “I mean, your heart? Your figure? Your circulation? Are you training for a marathon?”

  “I’m just running,” she said.

  “But why push yourself?”

  “I’m not pushing myself.”

  She was, though. After a run, there was something intense about her. She’d be glossy with sweat, strung up, a bundle of wiry muscles, vibrating. Her hair, loosened, flew out in an electric spray, each strand as crinkled as her amber-colored, crinkly hairpins. She was so different from other women that Morgan didn’t know quite how to go about her. He was baffled and moved and fascinated, and he loved to slide his fingers down the two new, tight cords behind each of her knees. He couldn’t imagine what it felt like to be Emily.

  In the hardware store one afternoon he closed his eyes and said, “Tell me what you see. Be my seeing eye.” She said, “A desk. A filing cabinet. A couch.” Then she seemed to give up. He opened his eyes and found her looking helpless, wondering what he wanted of her. But that was all he wanted: her pure, plain view of things. Not that he would ever really possess it.

  Morgan himself wasn’t so fond of exercise. He hated exercise, to tell the truth. (Oh, to tell the truth, he was a much, much older man, and not in such very good condition.) And Leon had no interest in it either. Leon was one of those people who seem permanently athletic without effort. He was in fine shape, heavy and solid, sleekly muscled. He watched Emily’s jogging distantly, with a tolerant expression on his face. “She’s going about it all wrong,” he told Morgan. “She’s driving herself too hard.”

  “Ah! Didn’t I say the same thing?”

  “She has to be in charge so. Has to win.”

  They were sitting on the front stoop of the apartment building on a sunny day in March. The weather felt tentative. After this bitter,
shocking winter, people seemed to view spring as a trick. They went on wearing woolen clothes, and removed them piece by piece each day as they grew warmer. Bonny still had her boxwoods shrouded in burlap. She mourned for her camellia buds, which had been fooled into emerging and would surely drop off with the next freeze. But spring continued. The camellia buds opened out triumphantly, a vivid pink with full, bloused petals. Morgan and Leon sat in their shirtsleeves, almost warm enough, too lazy to go in for their jackets, and around the corner came Emily: a little black butterfly of a person with yellow feet, far away. There was something about her running that seemed eternal. She was like the braided peasant girl in a weatherhouse, traveling forever on her appointed path, rain or shine, endearingly steadfast. Morgan felt himself grow weightless with happiness, and he expanded in the sunlight and beamed at everything with equal love: at Leon and the spindly, striving trees and Emily jogging up and away and the seagull wheeling overhead, floating through the chimneys in a languid search for the harbor.

  3

  Leon’s father had a heart attack, and Leon drove to Richmond to see him. Morgan visited Emily that evening. In the kitchen Gina was mixing a cake for her school’s bake sale. She kept coming into the living room and asking where the vanilla was, or the sifter, or prancing around Morgan and checking all his pockets for the coughdrops she was fond of. Morgan was patient with her. He held his arms out passively while she searched him. Then when she returned to the kitchen, he and Emily made casual, artificial conversation. He might have lounged on the couch beside her in the old days, not giving it a thought, but now he was careful to sit some distance from her on a straight-backed chair. He cleared his throat and said, “Bonny told me to ask if you wanted to borrow her car.”