Morgan's Passing (32 page)

“I have a cold,” he said.

“Oh, just a cold,” she said, relieved. She took off her coat and laid it on the desk.

“Just a cold! How can you say that?” he asked her. His energy seemed to be returning. He sat up, indignant. “Do you have any idea how I feel? My head is like a beachball. This morning I had a temperature of
ninety-nine point nine, and last night it was a hundred and one. I lay awake all night, and had fever dreams.”

“You can't do both,” Emily said. “Lie awake, and dream as well.”

“Why not?” he asked her.

He always had to throw his whole self into things—even into illness. His office looked like a hospital room. A Merck Manual lay open on the filing cabinet, and his desk was a jumble of medicines and cloudy drinking glasses. On the floor beside the couch were a bottle of cough syrup, a sticky teaspoon, and a cardboard box spilling papers. She bent to pick up one of the papers. It was a photograph of the oldest, homeliest washing machine she'd ever laid eyes on, the kind with a wringer attached.
Model 504A
, she read,
can easily be connected to any existing
 … She replaced the paper and sat down in the swivel chair at the desk. Morgan sneezed.

“Maybe you ought to be home in bed,” she told him.

“I can't rest at home. It's a madhouse there. Liz is still flat on her back trying to hang on to that baby. She gets the wicker breakfast tray; I end up with the tin meat platter. And people have already started arriving for Thanksgiving.”

Butkins called something. Morgan said, “Eh?”

“I'll be going now, Mr. Gower.”

“He ought to know I can't hear a thing with this cold,” Morgan told Emily.

“He says he's going,” Emily said. “Do you want me to help lock up?”

“Oh, thank you. It's true that I'm not myself.”

But he went on sitting there, blotting his nose with a handkerchief. Emily heard the front door shutting behind Butkins.

“When Butkins leaves the store,” Morgan said, “I sometimes wonder if he dematerializes. Ever thought of that?”

She smiled. He watched her soberly, not smiling himself. “What's wrong?” he asked.

What? Nothing,” Emily said.

“The tip of your nose is white.”

“It's nothing.”

“Don't lie to me,” he said. “I've known you nine years. When the tip of your nose is white, something's wrong. It's Leon, I suppose.”

“He thinks I'm narrow-minded,” Emily said.

Morgan sneezed again.

“He thinks I'm rigid, but
he's
the one. He never tries out for plays now, and that gospel-troupe man is still after us but Leon won't even talk to him. I'm getting claustrophobic. I can't drive after dark any more because the space is too small—you know, the lighted space the car travels in. I think I must be going crazy from irritation, just from little petty nameless irritations. Then he says that I'm the one who's narrow.”

Morgan shook a cigarette from an unfamiliar green pack. “See? We'd better elope,” he said.

“Do you think you ought to be smoking?”

“Oh, these are all right. They're menthol.”

He lit up and started coughing. He stumbled to his feet, as if reaching for more air, and wandered around the office, coughing and thumping his chest. Between gasps, he said, “Emily, you know I'm always here for you.”

“You want some Robitussin, Morgan?”

He shook his head, gave a final cough, and settled on his desk top. Medicine bottles clinked all around him. Emily wheeled her chair back slightly to allow him more room. His socks, she saw, were translucent black silk, and he wore pointy black patent-leather slippers that reminded her of Fred Astaire. He was sitting on her coat, rumpling it, but she decided not to point that out.

“I know you must find me laughable,” he told her.

“Oh, well, I wouldn't say
laughable
, really—”

“But I'm serious,” he said. “Let's stop fooling, Emily. I love you.”

He slid off his desk, disentangling himself with difficulty from her coat, which had somehow twisted itself around one of his legs. Emily stood up. (What did he have in mind?) He was, after all, a grown man, real, lean-bodied. The hunger with which he drew on his cigarette caused her to step behind her chair. But he went on past her. He was only pacing. He walked to the railing, looked over the darkened store below him, and walked back.

“Of course,” he said, “I don't intend any harm to your marriage. I admire your marriage very much. I mean, in a sense, I love Leon as well, and Gina; the unit as a whole, in fact … Who
is
it I love? But you, Emily …”

He flicked his ashes onto the floor. “I am fifty-one years old,” he said. “You're what, twenty-nine or thirty. I could easily be your father. What a joke, eh? I must look ridiculous.”

Instead he looked sad and kind, and also exhausted. Emily took a step in his direction. He circled her, musing. “I think of you as an illness,” he said. “Something recurrent, like malaria. I push the thought of you down, you see. Whole weeks go by … I imagine that I'm somehow deeper when I manage to overcome it. I feel stronger and wiser. I take some pleasure, then, in doing what I'm supposed to do. I carry the garbage out; I arrive at work on time …”

She touched his arm. He dodged her and went on pacing, head lowered, puffing clouds of smoke.

“I persuade myself,” he said, “that there is some virtue in the trivial, the commonplace. Ha! What a notion. I think of those things on TV, those man-in-the-street things where the ordinary triumphs. They stop some ordinary person and ask if he can sing a song, recite a poem … they stop a motorcycle gang. I've seen this! Black-leather motorcycle gang and ask, ‘Can you sing all the words to “Some Enchanted Evening”?'
And up these fellows start, dead serious, trying hard—I mean, fellows you would never expect had
heard
of ‘Some Enchanted Evening.' They stand there with their arms around each other, switchblades poking out of their pockets, brass knuckles in their blue jeans, earnestly, sweetly singing …”

He'd forgotten all about her. He was off on this track of his own, tearing back and forth across his office. Emily sat down on the couch and looked around her. There was a bulletin board on the wall above the filing cabinet, and it was covered with clippings and miscellaneous objects. An Adlai Stevenson button, a frowsy red feather, a snapshot of a bride, a blue silk rose … She imagined Morgan rushing in with them, the spoils of some mysterious, private war, and tacking them up, and chortling, and rushing out again. She was struck, all at once, by his separateness. He was absolutely unrelated to her. She would never really understand the smallest part of him.

“They stop this fat old lady,” he was saying. “A mess! A disaster. Gray and puffy like some failed pastry, and layers of clothes that seem to have melted together. ‘Can you sing “June Is Bustin' Out All Over”?' they ask, and she says, ‘Certainly,' and starts right up, so obliging, with this shiny grin, and ends with her arms spread and this little stamp-stamp finish—”

He bit down on his cigarette and stopped his pacing long enough to demonstrate—both hands outflung, one foot poised to stamp.
“Just … because
 … 
it's
JUNE
!” he sang, and he stamped his foot.

“I love you too,” she told him.

“
JUNE
!” he sang.

He paused. He took the cigarette from his mouth.

“Eh?” he said.

She smiled up at him.

He tugged his beard. He shot her a sidelong glance from under his eyebrows, and then he dropped his cigarette and slowly, meditatively ground it out with his
heel. When he sat on the edge of the couch, he still seemed to be thinking something over. When he bent to kiss her, he gave off a kind of shaggy warmth, like some furred animal, and he smelled of ashes and Mentholatum.

1977

1

M
organ's daughter Liz finally, finally had her baby, on the coldest night in the coldest February anyone could remember. It was Morgan who had to get up and drive her to the hospital. Then of course her husband, Chester, arrived from Tennessee, and when Liz was released from the hospital, she and Chester and the baby stayed on in her old room a few days till Liz was strong enough to travel. Meanwhile the house filled further, like something flooding upward from the basement. Amy and Jean kept stopping by with their children, and the twins drifted in from Charlottesville, and Molly and her family from New York, and by the time Kate arrived with her boyfriend, there was nowhere to put the boyfriend but the storeroom on the third floor, underneath the eaves. This was a weekend. They'd be gone by Monday, Morgan reminded himself. He loved them all, he was crazy about them, but life was becoming a little difficult. The daughters who hadn't got along in the past didn't get along any better now. The new baby appeared to be the colicky type. And there was never any time to see Emily.

“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.