Morgan's Passing Read online

  “Oh, that’s very nice of her. No, thank you.”

  “What if he’s gone a long time? You might need it.”

  “No.”

  “What if he’s gone through the weekend and it interferes with a puppet show?”

  “I’ll cancel it.”

  “Or I could come in his place. Why not? I’ll come as Leon.”

  “I’ll just cancel.”

  They looked at each other. Emily seemed paler than usual. She kept smoothing her skirt, but when she saw him watching she stopped abruptly and folded her hands in her lap. The strain was affecting her, he supposed. She was not accustomed to deceit. Neither was he, really—not to this kind. He wished they could just tell everyone and have done with it. Leon would say, “I understand,” and Morgan could move in and the four of them would be happy as larks, complete at last; they would laugh at how secretive they had been at first, how possessive, how selfish.

  There was a blue tinge around Emily’s eyes that gave her a raccoon look.

  He stood up and said, “I have to go. Will you see me out?”

  “Yes, certainly,” Emily said, and she stood too, smoothing her skirt again with a nervous gesture that wasn’t like her.

  They went down the hall, passing the kitchen, where Emily poked her head in and said, “Gina, I’ll be right back.”

  “Oh. Okay,” Gina said. She was covered with flour and she looked harassed and distracted.

  Morgan took Emily by the hand and led her out the door. But halfway down the stairs they heard footsteps coming up and he let go of her. It was Mrs. Apple in a bushy Peruvian poncho, briskly jingling her keys. “Oh! Emily. Dr. Morgan,” she said. “I was just stopping in to ask about Leon’s father. Is he going to be all right? Have you had any news?”

  “Not so far,” Emily said. “Leon said he’d phone me tonight.”

  “Well, I know how anxious you must be.”

  Morgan leaned against the banister, exasperated, waiting for this to end.

  “Oh, but with modern medicine,” Mrs. Apple said, “these things are nothing. A heart attack’s so simple. Everything’s replaceable; they’ll give him a Teflon tube or a battery or something and he’ll go on for years yet. Tell Leon he’ll go on forever. Right, Dr. Morgan?”

  “Right,” said Morgan, staring at the ceiling.

  If he inched his hand up the banister, he could just touch the back of Emily’s skirt—a slink of cool, slippery cloth with a hint of warmth beneath it. His fingertips rested there, barely in contact. Mrs. Apple didn’t notice. “If he’s not home by tomorrow night,” she was telling Emily, “you and Gina come for supper. Nothing fancy; you know I’m a vegetarian now …”

  When she finally let them go, Morgan strode rudely down the stairs and out the door without saying goodbye. Emily had to run to catch up with him. “I can’t abide that woman,” he said.

  “I thought you liked her.”

  “She repeats herself.”

  They walked fast, crossing the street and heading up the block toward Morgan’s pickup. It was a cool, windy night with a white sky overhead. A few people were out on the sidewalk—teenagers hanging around a lamppost, some women on their stoops. When Morgan reached the pickup, he took hold of the door handle and said, “Let’s go someplace.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Just a short way. Just to be alone.”

  “Gina will start wondering.”

  He sagged against the door.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  “Do?”

  He looked at her. She stood with her arms folded, gazing at some fixed point across the street. “I’m thinking of leaving,” she said. “Getting out.”

  It must be Leon again. Morgan thought she’d stopped being bothered by all that, by whatever it was … he had never quite understood, although he’d tried. It seemed he kept missing some clue. Were they talking about the same marriage? Emily, what is your problem, exactly? he sometimes wanted to ask, but he didn’t. He leaned against the pickup door and listened carefully, tilting his Panama hat forward over his eyes.

  “I’m even packed,” she said, “or half-packed. I’ve been packed for years. This morning I woke up and thought, ‘Why don’t I just leave, then? Wouldn’t it be simpler?’ These clothes are so foldable and non-crushable. They take up a single drawer and they’d fit with no trouble at all in the suitcase in the closet. I still have this cosmetic kit that I bought when I was first married. I’m set! It seems I always knew that I might have to be. I’ve worked it so I could grab my bag up any time and go.”

  Morgan was interested. “Yes, yes,” he said, nodding to himself. “I see what you mean.”

  Emily rattled on, like somebody clacking away in a fever. “When I jog, you know what I imagine? I imagine I’m in training for some emergency—a forced flight, a national disaster. It’s comforting to know that I’m capable of running several miles. Nights, sometimes, I wake with a jolt, scared to death, heart just racing. Then I tell myself, ‘Now, Emily, you can manage. You are very good at surviving. You can run five miles at a stretch, if you have to, and your suitcase can be ready in thirty seconds flat—’ ”

  “What you need is a backpack,” Morgan said. “An Army surplus backpack to leave your hands free.”

  Emily said, “I am seventeen days overdue.”

  “Seventeen days!” Morgan said.

  He thought at first she was referring to some new jogging record. Then even after he understood, he seemed to have trouble absorbing it. (It was years since he and Bonny had had to concern themselves with such things.) “Think of that!” he said, stalling for time, nodding more rapidly.

  “Of course, it could be a false alarm.”

  “Oh, yes, a false alarm.”

  “Will you please stop echoing?”

  It hit him all at once. He straightened and yanked the truck’s handle, and the door swung out, flooding Emily’s face with light. She looked sleepy and creased; her eyes had adjusted to the dark. But she met his gaze firmly. “Emily,” he said, “what are you telling me?”

  “What do you think I’m telling you?”

  He noticed that her face was pinched, as if from fear. He saw this suddenly from her viewpoint—seventeen days of waiting, not telling a soul. He shut the door again and laid an arm around her, heavily. “You should have mentioned this earlier,” he said.

  “I’m scared of what Leon will say.”

  “Yes, well …” He coughed. “Ah … will he realize? That is, will he realize that, ah, this is not his doing?”

  “Of course he will,” Emily said. “He does know how to count.”

  Morgan thought this over—all that it revealed. He patted her shoulder and said, “Well, don’t worry, Emily.”

  “Maybe it’s nerves,” Emily said.

  “Oh, yes. Nerves.” He saw that he was echoing again and he quickly covered it up. “These things are vicious circles. What’s the word I want? Self-perpetuating. The greater the delay, the more nervous you become, of course, and so the delay is even greater and you become even more—”

  “I do believe in abortion,” Emily said, “but I don’t believe in it for me.”

  “Oh?” he said.

  He frowned.

  “Well, for who, then?” he asked.

  “I mean, I don’t think I could go through with the actual process, Morgan.”

  “Oh, yes. Well—”

  “I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t.”

  “Oh. Well, naturally. Of course not,” he said. “No, naturally not.”

  He noticed that he was still patting her—an automatic gesture that was beginning to make his palm feel numb. “We shouldn’t stay out here, Emily,” he said. “You’d better go in now.”

  “I thought I was so careful,” she told him. “I don’t understand it.”

  Bonny used to say that—long, long ago in a younger, sunnier world. He had been through it all before. He was a grandfather several times over. He steered Emily back to he
r building at a halting, elderly pace. “Yes, well, yes, well,” he said, filling the silence. On her front steps he thought to say, “But we could always ask a doctor. Get some tests.”

  “You know I can’t stand doctors. I hate to just … hand myself over,” Emily said.

  “Now, now, don’t upset yourself. Why, tomorrow you may find this was all a mistake—nerves or a miscalculation. You’ll see.”

  He kissed her good night, and held the door while she slipped inside, and smiled at her through the glass. He was calm as a rock. And why shouldn’t he be?

  None of this was happening.

  4

  Now every day that passed meant another blank on the calendar, another whispered conversation on the phone or in Cullen Hardware. Leon was back from Richmond; they couldn’t talk in the apartment. But Emily’s sheeted eyes, when Morgan stopped in for a visit, told him all he cared to know.

  A week went by, and then two weeks. “What’s the matter with Emily?” Bonny asked. “Have you seen her? She never comes around any more.”

  Morgan thought of answering her. Just simply answering her. “Well,” Bonny might say, “these things happen, I suppose.” Or maybe, airily, “Oh, yes, I guessed as much.” (She was his oldest friend. She had known him over thirty years.) But he said nothing—or something offhand, inconsequential; nothing that mattered.

  Once he met Emily by accident in the Quick-Save Grocery. She was choosing a can of soup. Instantly, without even a greeting, they fell upon her signs and symptoms. (“I’m not the slightest bit morning-sick. And I would be, don’t you think? I was terribly sick with Gina.”) In the middle of the aisle Morgan set his fingertips precisely within the neckline of her leotard and gave a clinical frown into space, but her breasts were as small and tight as ever. He dismayed himself by longing, suddenly, to take her away to his faded office couch again. But he didn’t suggest it. No, if this turned out to be a false alarm, he promised, they would become the brightest, gayest, most aboveboard of companions—he and Emily and Leon, racketing along in a merry threesome, and he and Emily would not so much as hold hands except to … what, to help each other out of boats, through the windows of burning buildings.

  He turned these thoughts over continually, plowing them under, digging them up again, but the odd part was that he still felt sublimely, serenely distant. He seemed to have grown removed from everything. Even his own house, his family, he suddenly saw from outside. Often he paused in a doorway, say the door to his room, and looked in as if he were judging someone else’s life. It was not a bad place: the window open, curtains fluttering. He observed how lovely Bonny was when she fell into helpless laughter, which she was always doing. He noticed that when the house was full of women, there was a sound like water flowing in and out of the upstairs rooms. His mother and his sister spoke their chosen lines, which were as polished as the chorus of a poem. “This is the time when the artichokes begin, those spiky little leaves with a lemon-butter sauce …”

  “If Robert Roberts had not taken all my energy, all the care I ever had to give …” One of the twins—Susan, who had never married—was home recovering from a bout of hepatitis, and she lay peacefully in her old spool bed, knitting Morgan a beautiful long stocking cap from every color of scrap wool in the house. As for his other daughters—why, it began to seem he’d finally found a place in their eyes, basking among their clamorous children. What had been embarrassing in a father, it appeared, was lovably eccentric in a grandfather. Yes, and on second thought, even his work was not so terrible—his hardware store smelling of wood and machine oils, and Butkins perched on a stool behind the counter. Butkins! He was a skeletal, hay-colored man, with a nose so pointed that it seemed a clear drop hung perpetually at its tip. He had once been young—twenty-three when Uncle Ollie hired him. In Morgan’s mind he’d stuck at that age forever after, but now Morgan took a closer look and found him nearing forty, bowed by his wife’s ill health and the death of his only child. He seemed collapsed at the center, cavernous. His eyes were the palest, milkiest blue that Morgan had ever seen, celestially mild and accepting. Morgan felt he had wasted so much time, had nearly let this man slip through his fingers unnoticed. He took to hunkering on his office steps and bemusedly smoking cigarettes while he studied Butkins at work, till Butkins grew flustered and spilled coins all over the counter as he was making change.

  Emily phoned him at the hardware store. “I’m calling from home,” she said. “Leon’s gone out.”

  “How are you?” Morgan asked her.

  “Oh, well.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, but my back is starting to ache.”

  “Backache. Well, good! Yes, that’s a good sign, I’m certain of it.”

  “Or else not,” Emily said. “And anyhow, I may be just imagining things.”

  “No, no, how can you imagine a backache?”

  “It’s possible. There’s nothing so strange about that.”

  “Well, what are you feeling, exactly?”

  “I don’t know, it may be all in my mind.”

  “Just tell me what you’re feeling, please, Emily.”

  “Morgan, don’t snap at me.”

  “Sweetheart, I wasn’t snapping. Just tell me.”

  “You always get this … older tone of voice.”

  He lit a cigarette. “Emily,” he said.

  “Well, I have a dragginess in my back, you see, a really tired dragged-outness. Do you think that’s hopeful? I tried to jog this morning and I couldn’t do more than a block. Right now I have to go to Gina’s gymnastics meet, and I was thinking, ‘I’ll never make it, I know I’ll never make it. All I want to do is crawl into bed and sleep.’ Oh, but that’s a terrible sign, sleepiness. I just remembered. It’s the worst sign I could have.”

  “Nonsense,” Morgan told her. “You’re feeling the strain, that’s all. Why, naturally. You ought to get some rest, Emily.”

  “Well, maybe after Gina’s meet.”

  “What time is that? I’ll go in your place.”

  “Oh … in half an hour. But she’s expecting me.”

  “I’ll tell her you weren’t feeling well and she’ll have to take me instead.”

  “But I’m always letting her down, these days—”

  “Emily, go to bed,” he said. He hung up.

  He told Butkins he would be out for a while. Butkins nodded and went on alphabetizing packets of flower seeds. When all this was over, Morgan decided, he was really going to devote himself to the hardware store. He’d start bringing a sandwich and staying here through lunch hour, even. He set his beret at a steeper angle and went to find his pickup.

  Gina’s school was in the northern part of town—St. Andrew’s, a girls’ school that Leon’s parents had selected for her. They were paying her tuition and had the right to choose, Morgan supposed. Still, he didn’t think much of St. Andrew’s. He’d have preferred her to stay on at public school. He thought Leon’s parents were a bad influence: last Christmas they’d bought Emily an electric mixer. If Emily didn’t watch out, that apartment would be as overstuffed as anyone’s. These things could creep up on you, Morgan told her.

  He turned down the shady driveway of St. Andrew’s and parked beside a school bus. The gym must be the building straight ahead. He recognized the hollow sound that voices take on in a gymnasium. He crossed the playground, tucking in his workshirt and combing his beard with his fingers, hoping he made a good showing. (Gina was ten years old now—the age when you had to start watching your step. Any little thing could mortify her.)

  Evidently, he was late. The meet had already begun. In acres of echoing hardwood that smelled of varnish, little girls were teetering on a high chrome frame. Morgan crossed to the bleachers and settled himself on the lowest level, alongside a scattering of mothers. All the mothers wore blazers and blond, pageboy haircuts. He tried to picture Emily sitting here with them. He hunched forward in his seat and looked around for Gina. It took a moment (there were swarms of li
ttle girls in blue leotards and swarms in lavender, and he didn’t even know which color was St. Andrew’s), but he spotted her, finally. She was the one in blue with the cloud of curls. Her face was still round and opulent—he would know those heavy-lidded eyes anywhere, and that pale, delicate mouth—but her body had become a stick, the narrow hips pathetically high above legs so long and thin that he could see the workings of her kneecaps when she walked. She came over to him, her bare toes gripping the floor. Ordinarily she would hug him, but in front of friends she never did. “Where’s Mama?” she asked him.

  “She doesn’t feel well.”

  “She never comes to anything any more,” Gina said, but without much concern; her attention had already wandered elsewhere. She turned to study the girls on the other team. Then, “Morgan!” she screeched, spinning on him. “You can’t smoke in here!”

  She must have eyes in the back of her head. Morgan muttered, “Sorry,” and replaced his cigarette in the pack.

  “I could die of embarrassment,” she said.

  “Sorry, sweetheart.”

  “Are you giving me a ride home afterward?”

  “I will if you like.”

  “That red-haired girl is Kitty Potts. I hate and despise her,” Gina said. She ran off.

  Morgan watched a series of girls perform slow and trembling labors on a balance beam. Periodically, one would fall off and have to climb back on. Gina, when it was her turn, fell off twice. By the time she’d finished, Morgan’s muscles ached; he’d been holding his breath. He remembered that his daughter Kate had also liked gymnastics, a few years back. She’d won several ribbons. In fact, he didn’t believe he’d ever seen her fall or make an error, not once in any meet that he’d attended. He might have just forgotten, of course. But he was sure that her scores had been better. Gina’s was a 4.3, read off by a bored-looking woman at a microphone. Coming here today was an unnatural act, Morgan decided. He really had nothing to do with any of this—the unfamiliar gym, the blazered mothers, someone else’s daughter in a leotard. He wished he could get up and go back to the hardware store.