Morgan's Passing Read online

  They started on tour in September. They left New York in the van with all their worldly goods piled on top, including Emily’s and Leon’s two fat suitcases and the fluted silver coffeepot that Aunt Mercer had sent for a wedding gift. They went first to Philadelphia, where Barry knew a boy whose uncle owned a bar. For three nights they played out their skits in front of an audience that did not stop talking once, and they had to cull their ideas from Emily, whom they’d fed a few suggestions and planted on a barstool just in case. Then they moved on to Haightsville, south of Philadelphia. They thought they had a connection there, but that fell through, and they ended up in a tavern called the Bridle Club that was decorated to look like a stable. Emily had the impression that most of the customers were married to other people waiting at home. It was a middle-aged crowd—squat men in business suits, women with sprayed and gilded hair and dresses that looked one size too small. These people, too, talked among themselves throughout the skits, but they did offer a few ideas. A man wanted a scene in which a teenager announced to her parents that she was quitting school to become an exotic dancer. A woman proposed that a couple have a quarrel about the wife’s attempts to introduce a few gourmet foods to her husband. Both of these suggestions, when they were made, caused a little ripple of amusement through the room, and the group turned them into fairly funny skits; but Emily kept imagining that they might be true. The man did have the seedy, desolate look of a failed father; the woman was so frantically gay that she could very well have just escaped from a stodgy husband. What the audience was doing was handing over its pain, Emily felt. Even the laughter seemed painful, issuing from these men with their red, bunchy faces and the women bearing up bravely beneath their towering burdens of hair. For the third skit, a man sitting with three other men proposed the following: a wife develops the notion that her husband, a purely social drinker who can take it or leave it and quit whenever he wants to, supposing he ever did want to, is in fact an alcoholic. “Pretend like this woman gets more and more out of line,” he said. “Pretend like she goes around watering the Jack Daniel’s, calling up the doctor and the AA people. When he asks for a drink, she brings him ginger ale with a spoonful of McCormick’s brandy extract stirred in. When he wants to go out for a friendly night with his buddies, she says—”

  “Please!” said Barry, holding up a hand. “Leave something for us!”

  Then everyone laughed, except Emily.

  They were appearing at the Bridle Club for three nights, but the second night Emily didn’t go. She walked around town instead, until almost ten o’clock, looking into the darkened windows of Kresge and Lynne’s Dress Shoppe and Knitter’s World. Periodically, carloads of teenagers shot by, hooting at her, but Emily ignored them. She felt so much older than they were, she was surprised she wasn’t invisible to them.

  In the drugstore, which was the only place still open, she bought a zippered cosmetic kit for traveling, completely fitted with plastic jars and bottles and a tiny tube of Pepsodent. She and Leon were almost penniless at this point. They were having to sleep apart—Emily and the two other women at the Y, the men in the van. The last thing they could afford was a $4.98 cosmetic kit. Emily rushed back to her room, feeling guilty and pleased. She started rearranging her belongings—carefully pouring hand lotion into one of the bottles, fitting her silver hairbrush into a vinyl loop. But she really didn’t wear much make-up; the zippered bag took more room than her few cosmetics had taken on their own. It was a mistake. She couldn’t even get her money back; she’d used the bottles. She began to feel sick. She went through her suitcase throwing things out—her white school blouses, her jeans, every bit of underwear. (If she wore only leotards, she wouldn’t need underwear.) When she was done, all that remained in her suitcase were two extra wrap skirts, two extra leotards, a nightgown, and the cosmetic bag. The small cardboard wastebasket next to her bed was overflowing with filmy, crumpled, shoddy non-essentials.

  Their third appearance at the Bridle Club was canceled in favor of the owner’s cousin’s girlfriend, a torch singer. “I didn’t know there still were such things,” Leon told Emily. He looked depressed. He said he wasn’t sure this experience was as valuable as he’d once believed. But Barry May, who was more or less the leader of the group, refused to give up. He wanted to try Baltimore, which was full of bars, he said. Besides, one of the other members, Victor Apple, had a mother living in Baltimore, and they ought to be able to get a free place to stay.

  Emily knew as soon as they arrived that Baltimore would not work out. Although they drove miles and miles of it (Victor managed to get them lost), the city continued to strike her as narrow and confining: all those gloomy rowhouses, some no wider than a single room; those alleys choked with discarded tires and bottles and bedsprings; those useless-looking, hopeless men slumped on their stoops. But she took to Victor’s mother immediately. Mrs. Apple was a tall, cheerful, striding woman with clipped gray hair and a leathery face. She owned a shop called Crafts Unlimited, as well as the building that housed it, and various craftsmen filled her apartments, some paying only token rent until they could get on their feet. She gave the acting group a third-floor apartment, unfurnished and shabby but clean. It was split by a dark hall, with a living room and a bedroom on one side and a kitchen and a second bedroom on the other side. At the end of the hall was an antique bathroom, against whose window, long ago, the adjoining building had been constructed. You could stand at that window and see nothing but a sheet of old, spongy bricks. For some reason Emily found this comforting. It was the only view she had felt sure of lately.

  It seemed to her now that adjusting to new places used up pieces of a person. Large chunks of her had been broken off and left behind in New York, in Philadelphia, in Haightsville—anyplace she had painstakingly set out her mother’s silver-backed comb and brush on someone else’s peeling bureau and contrived a pretense of familiarity with someone else’s flaking walls and high, cracked ceiling. She followed Mrs. Apple everywhere; she couldn’t help herself. She dusted the carvings and the handmade furniture down in the shop and she learned how to work the cash register. She waited on customers during busy periods—not for pay, but for the sunny smell of new wood and freshly woven fabrics, and the brisk, offhand friendliness of Mrs. Apple.

  Emily and Leon slept in the front bedroom, in two sleeping bags. Victor spread his tangle of blankets in a corner of the living room. Barry and Paula and Janice slept in the back bedroom, three across. (Emily had given up trying to figure that out.) In the daytime Barry went looking for jobs while the others stayed home and played cards. They no longer practiced their skits or even mentioned them; but sometimes, watching them play poker, Emily had the feeling that to these people everything was a skit. When they lost, they groaned and tore their hair. When they won, they leaped up, flinging their cards to the ceiling, and trumpeted, “Tataa!” and took a bow. Their vowels were broader than most people’s, and they italicized so much. You had to talk like that yourself sometimes, just to be heard above the din. Emily found herself changing. She heard herself coming down hard on her words, drawing them out. She caught sight of herself in a mirror once, unexpectedly—her small, dry face as wan as a ghost’s, but one arm flung out grandly as if she were standing cloaked and hatted in the center of some stage. She stopped in mid-sentence and folded up again.

  The bars in Baltimore were not the kind to want plays going on. They were drinking bars, Barry said, and this was a drinking city. At one place he would have had to step over a flatout body, either unconscious or dead, in the doorway; but he hadn’t seen much point, he said, in applying there. A week passed, and then two weeks. They were living on a cheap brand of water-packed tuna, and Mrs. Apple had stopped inviting them so frequently to supper. Their greasepaint box somehow fell apart. Tubes of ghastly pink flesh-tone, like fat sticks of chalk, rolled into corners and stayed there, sending out their flowery old-lady smell. Janice and Paula stopped speaking to each other, and Janice moved her sleeping bag to the kitchen.<
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  Then Barry found a job, but only for himself. A friend of a friend was putting on his own play. Emily wasn’t there when he announced it. She’d been helping out at Crafts Unlimited. All she knew was that when she got back, there was Barry packing his knapsack. A swelling was rising on his lower lip, and Leon was gone. The others sat on the floor, watching Barry roll up his jeans with shaky hands. “That husband of yours is insane,” he told Emily. Even his voice shook.

  Emily said, “What happened?” and the others all started talking at once. It wasn’t Barry’s fault, they said; you have to watch out for number one in this world; what did Leon expect? Emily never did sort out the particulars, but she grasped the main idea. She was surprised at how little it bothered her. There was something satisfying about the damage done to Barry’s lip. The skin had split where the swelling was highest; she was reminded of an overripe plum. “Oh, well,” she said, “I suppose it’s for the best.”

  “Mark my words,” Barry told her, “you’re living with a dangerous man. I don’t know why you’re not scared of him.”

  “Oh, he would never harm me,” Emily said. She couldn’t think why Barry was taking this so seriously. Didn’t it often happen in these people’s lives—drama, extravagant gestures? She removed some hairpins from her hair and pinned her braids higher on her head. The others watched her. She felt graceful and light-hearted.

  Janice and Paula went back to New York; Janice planned to accept an old marriage proposal. “I just hope the offer’s still open,” she said. Emily had no idea what Paula was going to do, and she didn’t care, either. She was tired of living in a group. She got on fine with them, right to the end, and she said goodbye to them politely enough, but underneath she felt chafed by every word they uttered.

  That left Victor. Victor wasn’t so bad. He was only seventeen, and he seemed even younger. He was a slight, stooped, timid boy with a frail tickle of a mustache that Emily longed to shave off. Once the others were gone, he moved his blankets to the rear bedroom. He showed up for meals looking shy and hopeful. It was a little like having a son, Emily thought.

  By now they were completely out of money, so Emily started work as a paid assistant at Crafts Unlimited. Leon found a part-time job at Texaco, pumping gas. Victor just borrowed from Mrs. Apple. Mrs. Apple lent him the money, but gave out lectures with it. She wanted him to go back to school, or at least take the high-school-equivalency test. She threatened to send him to live with his father, whom Emily had always assumed to be dead. After these lectures Victor would slink around the apartment kicking baseboards. Emily commiserated with him, but she did think Mrs. Apple had a point. She couldn’t understand how things had gone this far, even; everyone seemed to be living lives without shape, without backbone. “When you think of it,” she told Victor, “it’s amazing your mother ever let you go to New York in the first place. Really, she’s a very … surprising woman.”

  “Sure, to you,” said Victor. “Other people’s mothers always look so nice. Up close, they’re strict and grabby and they don’t have a sense of humor.”

  Then Mrs. Apple came to Emily with an idea. (She probably felt that if she came to Victor, he’d turn it down automatically.) If they were so set on acting, she said, why not act at children’s birthday parties? They could put an ad in the paper, get a telephone, borrow her Singer sewing machine to stitch a few costumes together. Mothers could call and order “Red Riding Hood” or “Rapunzel.” (Emily would make a lovely Rapunzel, with her long blond hair.) They would gladly pay a good fee, she was certain, since birthday parties were such a trial.

  Emily passed the idea on because it sounded like something she could manage. She would not, at least, freeze up onstage in front of a few small children. Victor was immediately willing, but Leon looked doubtful. “Just the three of us?” he asked.

  “We could change costumes a lot. And there are always people around here, if we’re really stuck for more characters.”

  “We could use my mother for a witch,” Victor said. “Well, I don’t know,” Leon said. “I wouldn’t even call that acting, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Oh, Leon.”

  She dropped the subject for the next few days. She watched him weighing it in his mind. He came back from the Texaco station with his hands black, smearing black on the doorknobs and the switchplates. Even after he washed, black stayed in the creases of his skin and rimmed his fingernails. Sitting on the kitchen counter waiting for his tuna, he spread his hands on his knees and studied them, and then he turned them over and studied them again. Finally he said, “These children’s plays, I suppose they’d do for a stopgap.”

  Emily said nothing.

  He said, “It wouldn’t hurt to give it a try, just so we don’t get stuck in it.”

  Now, all this time Emily and Victor had been laying their plans, they’d been so sure he would change his mind. They’d already ordered a phone for the kitchen. It arrived the day after Leon gave in. They placed an ad in the papers and they made a large yellow poster to hang in Crafts Unlimited. Rapunzel, Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, the poster read. Or … you name it. (“Just so it doesn’t take a cast of thousands,” Leon said.)

  Then they sat back and waited. Nothing happened.

  On the sixth day a woman phoned to ask if they gave puppet shows. “I don’t need a play; I need a puppet show,” she said. “My daughter’s just wild about puppets. She doesn’t like plays at all.”

  “Well, I’m sorry—” Emily said.

  “Last year I had Peter’s Puppets come and she loved them, and all they charged was thirty-two dollars, but now I hear they’ve moved to—”

  “Thirty-two dollars?” Emily asked.

  “Four dollars a child, for seven guests and Melissa. I felt that was reasonable; don’t you?”

  “It’s more than reasonable,” Emily said. “For a puppet show we get five per child.”

  “Goodness,” the woman said. “Well, I suppose we could uninvite the Macintosh children.”

  In the two weeks before the party Emily borrowed Mrs. Apple’s sewing machine and put together a Beauty, two sisters, a father, and a Beast, who was really just a fake fur mitten with eyes. She chose “Beauty and the Beast” because it was her favorite fairytale. Victor said he liked it too. Leon didn’t seem to care. Plainly, as far as he was concerned, this was just another version of the Texaco job. He hardly noticed when Emily came prancing up to him with her hand transformed into Beauty.

  She cut a stage from a cardboard box, and bought gauzy black cloth for the scrim. She and Victor clowned together, putting on doll-like voices to match the puppets’ round faces. They had the two sisters sing duets and waltz on the kitchen windowsill. Leon just looked grim. He had figured out that most of their fee had already been spent on materials. “This is not going to make us rich,” he said.

  “But think of next time,” Emily said, “when we’ll already be equipped.”

  “Oh, Emily, let’s not have a next time.”

  On the day of the party—a rainy winter afternoon—they loaded everything into Victor’s mother’s car and drove north to Mrs. Tibbett’s stucco house in Homeland. Mrs. Tibbett led them through the living room to a large, cold clubroom, where Leon and Victor arranged the cardboard stage on a Ping-Pong table. Meanwhile Emily unpacked the puppets. Then she and Victor set the two sister puppets to whispering and snickering, trying to get Leon to join in. He was supposed to work the Beast, which he’d never even fitted on his hand; and he’d had to be told the plot during the drive over. He claimed the only fairytale he knew was “Cinderella.” Now he ignored the puppets and paced restlessly up and down, sometimes pausing to lift a curtain and peer out into the garden. It was because of his parents, Emily thought. This house resembled his parents’ house, which Emily had once visited during semester break. The living room had that same stiff, icy quality, with the pale rugs that no one seemed to have walked on and the empty vases, the ticking silence, the satin striped chairs, where obviously no chil
dren were ever allowed to sit. Mrs. Tibbett, even, was a little like Mrs. Meredith—so gracious and honeyed, her hair streaked, her mouth tight, with something unhappy beneath her voice if Leon would only hear it. Emily reached out to pat his arm, but then stopped herself and curled her fingers in.

  The doorbell rang—a whole melody. “It’s a goddamned cathedral,” Leon muttered. The first guests arrived, and Melissa Tibbett, a thin-faced, homely child in blue velvet, went to greet them. These children were all five years old or just turning six, Mrs. Tibbett had said. They were young enough to come too early, with their party clothes already sliding toward ruin, but old enough, at least, not to cling tearfully to the birthday presents they’d brought. Emily supervised the opening of the presents. Mrs. Tibbett had vanished, and the two men seemed to think that dealing with the children was Emily’s job. She learned the names that mattered—the troublemaker (Lisa) and the shy one who hid in corners (Jennifer). Then she settled them in front of the puppet show.

  Victor was the father. Emily was each of the daughters in turn. Concealed behind the scrim, she didn’t feel much stage fright. “What do you want me to bring you, daughter?” Victor squeaked.