Morgan's Passing (34 page)

“Ah! Didn't I say the same thing?”

“She has to be in charge so. Has to win.”

They were sitting on the front stoop of the apartment building on a sunny day in March. The weather felt tentative. After this bitter, shocking winter, people seemed to view spring as a trick. They went on wearing woolen clothes, and removed them piece by piece each day as they grew warmer. Bonny still had her boxwoods shrouded in burlap. She mourned for her camellia buds, which had been fooled into emerging and would surely drop off with the next freeze. But spring continued. The camellia buds opened out triumphantly, a vivid pink with full, bloused petals. Morgan and Leon sat in their shirtsleeves, almost warm enough, too lazy to go in for their jackets, and around the corner came Emily: a little
black butterfly of a person with yellow feet, far away. There was something about her running that seemed eternal. She was like the braided peasant girl in a weatherhouse, traveling forever on her appointed path, rain or shine, endearingly steadfast. Morgan felt himself grow weightless with happiness, and he expanded in the sunlight and beamed at everything with equal love: at Leon and the spindly, striving trees and Emily jogging up and away and the seagull wheeling overhead, floating through the chimneys in a languid search for the harbor.

3

L
eon's father had a heart attack, and Leon drove to Richmond to see him. Morgan visited Emily that evening. In the kitchen Gina was mixing a cake for her school's bake sale. She kept coming into the living room and asking where the vanilla was, or the sifter, or prancing around Morgan and checking all his pockets for the coughdrops she was fond of. Morgan was patient with her. He held his arms out passively while she searched him. Then when she returned to the kitchen, he and Emily made casual, artificial conversation. He might have lounged on the couch beside her in the old days, not giving it a thought, but now he was careful to sit some distance from her on a straight-backed chair. He cleared his throat and said, “Bonny told me to ask if you wanted to borrow her car.”

“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 her 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

N
ow 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.