Morgan's Passing (25 page)

“Well, I didn't notice that patrolman disagreeing with me.”

“The fellow's speedometer was way off base,” Leon said, “and I'm going to tell them so when it comes to court.” He took out a small suitcase and slammed the trunk lid shut. “These people just have a quota to fill. They'll pick up anyone, if they haven't passed out enough tickets that day.”

“Ah, well,” Morgan said soothingly. “You got here safely; that's what's important.” He took the suitcase from Leon. It weighed more than he'd expected. “Come on in the house,” he said. “Bonny! The Merediths are here!”

He led them up the front steps into the living room. The house's smell—mildew and kerosene—struck him for the first time as unfriendly. He noticed that the cushions in the rattan chairs were flat as pancakes, soggy-looking, and the rattan itself was coming loose in spirals from the arms. Maybe this hadn't been such a good idea. Emily and Leon stared around uncertainly. Gina slouched near the door and peeled a thumbnail. This was her summer to thin out, it seemed. Her halter top sagged pathetically around her flat little chest. Morgan felt he was suddenly viewing everyone, himself included, in terms of geometry: an ill-assorted collection of knobs and bulges parked in meaningless locations. Then Emily said, “I brought a camera.”

“Eh?” said Morgan. “Oh, a camera!”

“Just a Kodak.”

“But that's wonderful!” he said. “I left mine at home this year. Oh, it's wonderful that you thought of it!” And just then Bonny emerged from the kitchen, smiling, wiping her palms on her skirts. He saw that things would be fine after all. (Life was full of these damp little moments of gloom that came and went; they meant nothing.) He beamed and watched as Bonny hugged everyone. Behind her came his mother, also smiling. “Mother,” he said, “you remember the Merediths.”

“Of course,” she said. She held out a hand, first to Leon and then to Emily. “You brought me that fruitcake last Christmas,” she told Emily.

“Oh, yes.”

“It had the most marvelous glaze on the top.”

“Why, thank you,” Emily said.

“And did your husband ever recover from his stroke?”

“Excuse me?”

Morgan saw in a flash what must have happened. His mother had Emily confused with Natalie Czernov, a next-door neighbor from Morgan's childhood. Mrs. Czernov had also made fruitcake at Christmas. He was so fascinated by this slippage in time (as if the fruitcake were a kind of key that opened several doors at once, from several levels of history) that he forgot to come to Emily's rescue. Emily said, “This is my husband right here, Mrs. Gower.”

“Oh, good, he's better, then,” Louisa said.

Emily looked at Morgan.

“Maybe I should show you where you're staying,” he said.

He picked up their suitcase again and led them down the hall to Kate's room. The bed had been freshly made and there was a sleeping bag on the floor for Gina. “The bathroom is next door,” he said. “There are towels above the sink. If you need anything else …”

“I'm sure we'll be fine,” Emily said. She opened the suitcase. Morgan glimpsed several new-looking squares of folded clothing. Leon, meanwhile, crossed
the room abruptly and looked out the window. (All he would see was a row of dented trashcans.) Then he moved on to the picture that hung over the bed: a dim blue sea, flat as glass, on which rode a boat made of real shells. “We shouldn't have come,” he said, peering at a clamshell sail.

“Oh, Leon, we need a rest,” Emily told him.

“We have to give a puppet show on Monday morning. That means either we fight the Sunday traffic on the Bridge, or we go back at the crack of dawn on Monday, driving like hell to meet the schedule, and Lord help us if we have a flat or any little tie-up on the way.”

“It's nice to get out of the city,” Emily told Morgan. She removed a camera from the suitcase and closed the lid again. “Leon thought we couldn't take the time, but I said, ‘Leon, I'm tired. I want to go. I'm tired of puppets.' ”

“She's tired of puppets,” Leon said. “Whose idea were they, I'd like to know? Whose were they in the first place? I'm only doing what you said to, Emily. You're the one who started this.”

“Well, there's no good reason we can't leave them for a weekend, Leon.”

“She thinks we can just leave whenever we like,” Leon told Morgan.

Morgan passed a hand across his forehead. He said, “Please. I'm sure this will all work out. Don't you want to come see the ocean now?”

Neither Leon nor Emily answered him. They stood facing each other across the bed, their backs very straight, as if braced for something serious. They didn't even seem to notice when Morgan left the room.

8

N
o, it hadn't been such a good idea to ask them here. The weekend passed so slowly, it didn't so much pass as
chafe
along. It ground to a stop and started up again. It rasped on Morgan's nerves. Actually, this was not entirely the Merediths' fault. It was more the fault of Brindle, who faded into tears a dozen times a day; or Bonny, who overdid her sunbathing and developed a fever and chills; or Kate, who was arrested in Ocean City on charges of possessing half an ounce of marijuana. But Morgan blamed the Merediths anyhow. He couldn't help but feel that Leon's sulkiness had cast some kind of evil spell, and he was irritated by the way Emily hung around Bonny all the time. (Who had befriended Emily first, after all? Who had first discovered her?) She had changed; just wearing different shoes on her feet had somehow altered her. He began to avoid her. He devoted himself to Gina—a sad, sprouty child at an awkward age, just the age to tear at his heart. He made her a kite from a Hefty bag, and she thanked him earnestly, but when he looked into her face he saw that she was really watching her parents, who were arguing in low voices at the other end of the porch.

He began reflecting on Joshua Bennett, a new neighbor back in Baltimore. This Bennett was an antique dealer. (Now,
there
was an occupation.) He looked like Henry the Eighth and he lived a gentlemanly life—eating small, expensive suppers, then reading leather-bound history books while twirling a snifter of brandy. Early last spring, when Bennett first moved in, Morgan had
paid a call on him and found him in a maroon velvet smoking jacket with quilted satin lapels. (Where would one go to buy a smoking jacket?) Bennett had somehow received the impression that Morgan had descended from an ancient Baltimore shipping family and owned an atticful of antique bronzes, and he had been most cordial—offering Morgan some of his brandy and an ivory-tipped cigar. Morgan wondered if Bennett would have accepted an invitation to the beach. He began plotting his return to Baltimore: the friendship he would strike up, the conversations they would have. He could hardly wait to get back.

Meanwhile the weekend dragged on.

Kate had disgraced the family, Bonny said. Now she was on the police files, marked for life. Bonny seemed to take this very seriously. (Her sunburn gave her a hectic, intense look.) Because the cottage had no telephone, the Ocean City police had had to call the Bethany police and have them notify the Gowers. Naturally, therefore, the news would be everywhere now. Saturday, at breakfast, Bonny laid a blazing hand on Louisa's arm and asked Kate, “How do you think your grandma feels? Her late husband's name, which up till now has been unbesmirched.” Morgan had never heard her use the word “unbesmirched” before, and he wasn't even sure that it existed. He took some time thinking it over. Louisa, meanwhile, went on calmly spooning grapefruit. “What do you say, Mother?” Bonny asked her.

Louisa peered out of her sunken eyes and said, “Well, I don't know what all the fuss is about. We used to give little babies marijuana any old time. It soothed their teething.”

“No, no, Mother, that was belladonna,” Bonny said.

Kate merely looked bored. Brindle blew her nose. The Merediths sat in a row and watched, like members of a jury.

And on the beach—where the ocean curled and flattened beneath a deep blue bowl of sky, and gulls floated overhead as slow as sails—this group was a motley
scramble of blankets, thermoses, sandy towels, an umbrella that bared half its spokes every time the wind flapped past, a squawking radio, and scattered leaves of newspaper. Kate, who had been grounded for the rest of her vacation, flipped angrily through
Seventeen
. Bonny sweated and shivered in layers of protective garments. The white zinc oxide on her nose and lower lip, along with her huge black sunglasses, gave her the look of some insect creature from a science-fiction movie. Gina dug a hole in the sand and climbed into it. Billy and Priscilla made a spectacle of themselves, lying too close together on their blanket.

And Emily, in an unbecoming pale blue swimsuit that exposed her thin, limp legs, took pictures that were going to turn out poorly, but she would not yield her camera to Morgan. She worried that he would snap
her
, she said. Morgan swore he wouldn't. (She was already pasted in his mind as he would like her to be forever-wearing her liquid black skirt and ballet slippers. He would surely not choose to record this other self she had become.) “All I want to do,” he told her, “is photograph some groups. Some action, don't you see.” He couldn't bear her finicky delays, the stylized poses she insisted on. Morgan himself was a photographer of great speed and dash; he caught people in clumps, in mid-motion, mid-laugh. Emily picked her way across the sand to one person at a time, stopping every step or so to shake her white feet fastidiously, and then she would take an eternity getting things just right, squinting through the camera, squinting at the sky—as if there were anything that could be done, any adjustments at all to aid a Kodak Instamatic. “Be still, now,” she would tell her subject, but then she'd wait so long that whoever it was grew strained and artificial-looking, and more than once Morgan cried, “Just
take
it, dammit!” Then Emily lowered her camera and turned, eyes widening, lips parting, and had to begin all over again.

Sunday afternoon the Merediths had a quarrel about when they were going home. Emily wanted to wait till
Monday, but Leon wanted to leave that evening. “Lord, yes,” Morgan longed to say. “Go!”—not only to the Merediths but to everyone. They could abandon him on the beach. Fall would come and he'd be buried under drifting threads of sand and a few brown leaves blown seaward. He pictured how calm he would grow, at last. The breakers would act for him, tumbling about while he lay still. He would finally have a chance to sort himself out. It was
people
who disarranged his life—Louisa in her striped beach robe like a hawk-nosed Bedouin, Brindle in an old stretched swimsuit of Bonny's that fell in vacant folds around her hunched body. He sat beneath the umbrella in his sombrero and trunks and his shoes with woolen socks. His bare chest felt itchy and sticky. He chewed a match and listened to the Merediths quarrel.

Leon said that if they left Monday, they might very well miss their show. Emily said it was only a puppet show. Leon asked how she could say
only
. Wasn't it what she'd set her heart on, dragged him into, held his nose to—damn puppets with their silly grins—all these years? She said she had never held his nose to anything and, anyway, it was Leon's business what he did with his life. She had certainly not forced him into this, she said. Then Leon jumped to his feet and went striding southward, toward town. Morgan watched after him, idly observing that Leon had developed a roll of padded flesh above the waistband of his trunks. He was a solid, weighty man now, and came down hard on his heels. Flocks of slender girls parted to let him pass. He pushed on through them, not giving them a glance.

Possibly, Billy and Priscilla were quarreling too, for they sat apart from each other and Billy drew deep circles in the sand between his feet. The women melted closer together; the men remained on the outskirts, each alone, stiff-necked. The women's soft voices wove in with the rush of the ocean. “Look at the birds,” Emily told Gina. “Look how they circle. Look how they're hunting for fish.”

“Or maybe they're just cooling off their under-wings,” Louisa said.

Bonny, gazing at the horizon from behind her dark glasses, spoke in a tranquil, faraway voice. “It was here on this beach,” she said, “that I first knew I was a grownup. I had thought of myself as a girl for so long—years after I was married. I was twenty-nine, pregnant with the twins. I'd brought Amy and Jeannie to the beach to play. I saw the lifeguard look over at me and then at some spot beyond me, and I realized he hadn't really seen me at all. His mind told him, ‘Lady. Children. Sand toys,' and he passed on. Oh, it's not as if I were ever the kind that boys would whistle at. It's not as if I were used to hordes of men admiring me, even back when I was in my teens. But at least, you see, I had once been up for consideration, and now I wasn't. I was reclassified. I felt so sad. I felt I'd had something taken away from me that I was so certain of, I hadn't even noticed I had it. I didn't know it would happen to me too, just to anyone else.”