Morgan's Passing Read online

  Later on (just a few weeks later, when their daughter’s birth had faded and they felt she had always been with them), they almost wondered if they had imagined the man—just conjured him up in a time of need. His hat, Emily said, had made her think of a gnome. He really could have been someone from a fairytale, she said: the baby elf, the troll, the goblin who finds children under cabbage leaves and lays them in their mothers’ arms and disappears.

  1968

  1

  You could say he was a man who had gone to pieces, or maybe he’d always been in pieces; maybe he’d arrived unassembled. Various parts of him seemed poorly joined together. His lean, hairy limbs were connected by exaggerated knobs of bone; his black-bearded jaw was as clumsily hinged as a nutcracker. Parts of his life, too, lay separate from other parts. His wife knew almost none of his friends. His children had never seen where he worked; it wasn’t in a safe part of town, their mother said. Last month’s hobby—the restringing of a damaged pawnshop banjo, with an eye to becoming suddenly musical at the age of forty-two—bore no resemblance to this month’s hobby, which was the writing of a science-fiction novel that would make him rich and famous. He was writing about the death of Earth. All these recent flying saucers, he proposed, belonged to beings who knew for a fact that our sun would burn out within a year and a half. They weren’t just buzzing Earth for the hell of it; they were ascertaining what equipment would be needed to transfer us all to another planet in a stabler, far more orderly solar system. He had written chapter one, but was having trouble with the opening sentence of chapter two.

  Or look at his house: a tall brick Colonial house in north Baltimore. Even this early on a January morning, when the sun was no more than a pinkish tinge in an opaque white sky, it was clear there was something fragmented about Morgan’s house. Its marble stoop was worn soft at the edges like an old bar of soap, and heavy lace curtains glimmered in the downstairs windows; but on the second floor, where his daughters slept, the curtains were made from sections of the American flag, and on the third floor, where his mother slept, they were lace again, misting the tangle of ferns that hung behind them. And if you could see inside, through the slowly thinning gray of the hallway, you would find the particles of related people’s unrelated worlds: his daughters’ booksacks tumbling across the hall radiator, which also served as mail rack, sweater shelf, and message bureau; his wife’s League of Women Voters leaflets rubber-banded into a tower on the living-room coffee table; and his mother’s ancient, snuffling dog dreaming of rabbits and twitching her paws as she slept on the cold brick hearth. There was a cribbage board under the sofa. (No one knew this. It had been lost for weeks.) There was a jigsaw puzzle, half completed, that Morgan’s sister, Brindle, filled her long, morose, spinsterish days with: a view of an Alpine village in the springtime. The church steeple was assembled and so were the straight-edged border and the whole range of mountains with their purple and lavender shadows, but she would never get to the sky, surely. She would never manage all that blank, unchanging blue that joined everything else together.

  In the glass-fronted bookcase by the dining-room door, rows of books slumped sideways or lay flat: Morgan’s discarded manuals reflecting various spells of enthusiasm (how to restore old paintings and refinish secondhand furniture; how to cure illness with herbs; how to raise bees in his attic). Beneath them sat his wife Bonny’s college yearbooks, where Bonny appeared as a freckled, exuberant girl in several different team uniforms; and under those were his daughters’ tattered picture books and grade-school textbooks and Nancy Drews, and his mother’s tiny, plump autograph book, whose gilded title had been eaten away by worms or mildew or maybe just plain time, so that all that remained was a faintly shining trail of baldness as if a snail had crossed the crimson velvet in a tortuous script that coincidentally spelled out Autographs. (And on the first, yellowed page, in a hand so steely and elegant that you’d only see it now on a wedding invitation: Louisa dearest, Uncle Charlie is not a poet so will only write his name hereunder, Charles Brindle, Christmas Day, 1911—that awkward little shrug of inadequacy descending through the years so clearly, though the man had been dead a quarter-century or more and even Louisa might have had trouble recollecting him.) The bottom shelf held a varnished plaque of Girl Scout knots, a nearly perfect conch shell, and a brown cardboard photo album pasted with photographs so widely spaced in time that whole generations seemed to be dashing past, impatient to get it over with. Here was Morgan’s father, Samuel, a boy in knickers; and next to him stood Samuel full-grown, marrying Louisa with her bobbed hair and shiny stockings. Here was little Morgan in a badly knitted pram set; and Morgan at eleven holding his infant sister, Brindle, as if he might have preferred to drop her (and look! was that the same pram set? only slightly more puckered and with some new stain or shadow down the front). And then suddenly Morgan at twenty-four, shorter-haired than he would ever be again, raw-necked, self-conscious, beside his plump, smiling wife with their first baby in his arms. (No telling where their wedding photo had got to, or that famous pram set either, for all Amy wore was a sagging diaper.) Now they stopped for breath for a moment. Here were fifteen solid pages of the infant Amy, every photo snapped by Morgan in the first proud flush of fatherhood. Amy sleeping, nursing, yawning, bathing, examining her fist. Amy learning to sit. Amy learning to crawl. Amy learning to walk. She was a sturdy child with her mother’s sensible expression, and she appeared to be more real than anyone else in the album. Maybe it was the slowness with which she plodded, page by page, through the early stages of her life. She took on extra meaning, like the frame at which a movie is halted. (The experts lean forward; someone points to something with a long, official pointer …) Then the photos speeded up again. Here was the infant Jean, then the twins in their miniature spectacles, then Liz on her first day of nursery school. The film changed to Kodachrome, brighter than nature, and the setting was always the beach now—always Bethany Beach, Delaware, for where else could a man with seven daughters find the time for his camera? To look at the album, you would imagine that these people enjoyed an endless stream of vacations. Bonny was eternally sunburned, bulging gently above and below her one-piece Lastex swimsuit. The girls were eternally coconut-oiled and gleaming in their slender strips of bikinis, holding back handfuls of wind-tossed hair and laughing. Always laughing. Where were the tears and quarrels, and the elbowing for excessive amounts of love and space and attention? What about all those colds and tonsillectomies? Where was Molly’s stammer? Or Susan’s chronic nightmares? Not here. They sat laughing without a care in the world. At the edges of their bikinis, paler flesh showed, the faintest line of it, the only reminder of other seasons. And, oh yes, Morgan. One picture a year, taken aslant and out of focus by some amateurish daughter: Morgan in wrinkled trunks that flared around his thighs, whiskered all over, untouched by the sun, showing off his biceps and probably grinning, but how could you tell for sure? For on his head he wore an Allagash jungle hat from L. L. Bean, and mosquito netting in sweeps and folds veiled his face completely.

  Now the light had reached the stairwell and sent a gleam along the banister, but the carpeted steps were still in darkness and the cat slinking up them was only a shadow, her stripes invisible, her pointed face a single spear of white. She crossed the hall floorboards without a sound. She strode to the north rear bedroom and paused in the doorway and then advanced, so purposeful that you could see how every joint in her body was strung. Next to Bonny’s side of the bed, she rose up on her hind legs to test the electric blanket—pat-pat along the edge of the mattress with one experienced paw, and then around to Morgan’s side and pat-pat again. Morgan’s side was warmer. She braced herself, tensed, and sprang onto his chest, and Morgan grunted and opened his eyes. It was just that moment of dawn when the air seems visible: flocked, like felt, gathering itself together to take on color at any second. The sheets were a shattered, craggy landscape; the upper reaches of the room were lit by a grayish haze, like the smoke that rises from bombed bui
ldings. Morgan covered his face. “Go away,” he told the cat, but the cat only purred and sent a slitted stare elsewhere, pretending not to hear. Morgan sat up. He spilled the cat onto Bonny (a nest of tangled brown hair, a bare, speckled shoulder) and hauled himself out of bed.

  In the winter he slept in thermal underwear. He thought of clothes—all clothes—as costumes, and it pleased him to stagger off to the bathroom hitching up his long johns and rummaging through his beard like some character from the Klondike. He returned with his face set in a brighter, more hopeful expression, having glimpsed himself in the bathroom mirror: there were decisions to be made. He snapped on the closet light and stood deciding who to be today. Next to Bonny’s wrinkled skirts and blouses the tumult of his clothes hung, tightly packed together—sailor outfits, soldier outfits, riverboat-gambler outfits. They appeared to have been salvaged from some traveling operetta. Above them were his hats, stacked six deep on the shelf. He reached for one, a navy knit skullcap, and pulled it on and looked in the full-length mirror: harpooner on a whaling ship. He took it off and tried next a gigantic, broad-brimmed leather hat that engulfed his head and shaded his eyes. Ah, back to the Klondike. He tugged a pair of crumpled brown work pants over his long underwear, and added striped suspenders to hook his thumbs through. He studied his reflection awhile. Then he went to the bureau and plowed through the bottom drawer. “Bonny?” he said.

  “Hmm.”

  “Where are my Ragg socks?”

  “Your what?”

  “Those scratchy, woolly socks, for hiking.”

  She didn’t answer. He had to pad barefoot down the stairs, grumbling to himself. “Fool socks. Fool house. Nothing where it ought to be. Nothing where you want it.”

  He opened the back door to let the dog out. A cold wind blew in. The tiles on the kitchen floor felt icy beneath his feet. “Fool house,” he said again. He stood at the counter with an unlit cigarette clamped between his teeth and spooned coffee into the percolator.

  The cabinets in this kitchen reached clear to the high ivory ceiling. They were stuffed with tarnished silver tea services and dusty stemware that no one ever used. Jammed in front of them were ketchup bottles and cereal boxes and scummy plastic salt-and-pepper sets with rice grains in the salt from last summer when everything had stuck to itself. Fool house! Something had gone wrong with it, somehow. It was so large and formal and gracious—a wedding present from Bonny’s father, who had been a wealthy man. Bonny had inherited a portion of his money. When the children stepped through the attic floor, it was Bonny who dialed the plasterers, and she was always having the broken windowpanes replaced, the shutters rehung when they sagged off their hinges, the masonry put back in chinks where the English ivy had clawed it away; but underneath, Morgan never lost the feeling that something here was slipping. If they could just clear it out and start over, he sometimes thought. Or sell it! Sell it and have done with it, buy a plainer, more straightforward place. But Bonny wouldn’t hear of it—something to do with capital gains; he didn’t know. It just never was the proper time, any time he brought it up.

  The three smaller bedrooms, intended for a tasteful number of children, barely contained Morgan’s daughters, and Brindle and Louisa shared an edgy, cramped existence on the third floor. The lawn was littered with rusty bicycles and raveling wicker furniture where Bonny’s father had surely imagined civilized games of croquet. And nowadays apartment buildings were sprouting all around them, and the other houses were splitting into units and filling up with various unsortable collections of young people, and traffic was getting fierce. They seemed to be deep in the city. Well, all right. Morgan himself had been reared in the city, and had nothing against it whatsoever. Still, he kept wondering how this could have happened. As near as he could recall, he had planned on something different. He had married his wife for her money, to be frank, which was not to say he didn’t love her; it was just that he’d been impressed, as well, by the definiteness that money had seemed to give her. It had hovered somewhere behind her left shoulder, cloaking her with an air of toughness and capability. She was so clear about who she was. Courting her, Morgan had specifically bought a yachting cap with an eagle on the front, and white duck trousers and a brass-buttoned blazer to wear while visiting at her family’s summer cottage. He had sat outside on the terrace, securely defined at last, toying with the goblet of tropical punch that Bonny’s father had insisted on mixing for him—although in fact Morgan didn’t drink, couldn’t drink, had never been able to. Drinking made him talk too much. It made him spill the beans, he felt. He was trying to stay in character.

  Staying in character, he had asked her father for Bonny’s hand. Her father gave his approval; Morgan had wondered why. He was only a penniless graduate student with no foreseeable future. And he knew that he was nothing much to look at. (In those days he wore no beard, and there was something monkeyish and clumsy about his face.) When he took Bonny out somewhere, to one of her girlfriends’ parties, he felt he was traveling under false pretenses. He felt he had entered someone else’s life. Only Bonny belonged there—an easygoing, pleasant girl, two or three years older than Morgan, with curly brown hair worn low on her neck in a sort of ball-shaped ponytail. Later, Morgan figured out that her father must have miscalculated. When you’re rich enough, he must have thought, then it doesn’t matter who you marry; you’ll go on the same as ever. So he had nodded his blessing and given them this house, and expected that nothing would change. Luckily for him, he died soon after the wedding. He never saw the mysterious way the house started slipping downward, or sideways, or whatever it was that it was doing. He didn’t have to watch as Bonny’s dirndl skirts (once so breezy, so understated) began dipping at the hems, and her blouses somehow shortened and flopped bunchily out of her waistbands.

  “Your father would have sold this house long ago,” Morgan often told her. “Capital gains or no capital gains, he’d say you should get a new one.”

  But Bonny would say, “Why? What for?” She would ask, “What’s wrong with this one? Everything’s been kept up. I just had the roofers in. The painters came last May.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “What is it that bothers you? Can you name one thing that’s in disrepair? Name it and I’ll fix it. Every inch is in perfect shape, and the Davey tree men just fertilized the trees.”

  Yes, but.

  He went out front for the paper. Under his bare feet the spikes of frosty grass crunched and stabbed. Everything glittered. A single rubber flip-flop skated on the ice in the birdbath. He dashed back in, hissing, and slammed the door behind him. Upstairs an alarm clock burred, as if set off by the crash. They would be swarming everywhere soon. Morgan removed the news section and the comics section, laid them on a kitchen chair, and sat on them. Then he lit his cigarette and opened to the classified ads.

  LOST. White wedding dress size 10. No questions asked.

  He grinned around his cigarette.

  Now here came Bonny, slumping in, still buttoning her housecoat, trying to keep her slippers on her feet. Her hair was uncombed and there was a crease down one side of her face. “Did it freeze?” she asked him. “Is there frost on the ground? I meant to cover the boxwoods.” She lifted a curtain to peer out the window. “Oh, Lord, it froze.”

  “Mm?”

  She opened a cupboard door and clattered something. A blackened silver ashtray arrived inside the partition of Morgan’s newspaper. He tapped his cigarette on it. “Listen to this,” he told her. “FOUND. Article of jewelry, in Druid Hill Park. Caller must identify. I would call and say it was a diamond ring.”

  “How come?” Bonny asked. She took a carton of eggs from the refrigerator.

  “Well, chances are no one wears real pearls to the zoo, or platinum bracelets, but plenty of people wear engagement rings, right? And besides, you can be so general about a ring. Yes, I would say a ring. Absolutely.”

  “Maybe so,” said Bonny, cracking an egg on a skillet.

  “LOST. Upper dentur
e. Great sentimental value,” Morgan read out. Bonny snorted. He said, “I made it up about the sentimental value.”

  “I never would have guessed,” Bonny told him.

  He could hear bare feet pounding upstairs, water running, hairdryers humming. The smell of percolating coffee filled the kitchen, along with the crisp, sharp smoke from his Camel. Oh, he was hitting his stride, all right. He had managed it, broken into another day. He spread his paper wider. “I love the classifieds,” he said. “They’re so full of private lives.”

  “Are you going to get those shoes fixed this morning?”

  “Hmm? Listen to this: M.G. All is not forgiven and never will be.”

  Bonny set a cup of coffee in front of him.

  “What if that’s me?” Morgan asked.

  “What if what’s you?”

  “M.G. Morgan Gower.”

  “Did you do something unforgivable?”

  “You can’t help wondering,” Morgan said, “seeing a thing like that. You can’t help stopping to think.”

  “Oh, Morgan,” Bonny said. “Why do you always take the papers so personally?”

  “Because I’m reading the personals,” he told her. He turned the page. “WANTED,” he read. “Geotechnical lab chief.”

  (For the past nineteen years he had supposedly been looking for a better job. Not that he expected to find it.)

  “Here’s one. Experienced go-go girls.”