Anne Tyler - Morgan's Passing

When Leon came back, the crib was still there, but he didn't mention it. Maybe he'd been doing some thinking himself. The following day Emily started assembling it. She would join two pieces and then leave it a while, as if it were only something to fiddle with- a crossword puzzle, a hoop of needlework. Then she'd come back and tighten a bolt; then she'd leaf through the paper. In a few days she had a completed crib. It seemed silly to leave it obstructing the hall, so she wheeled it into their bedroom. The effect was dazzling. All that white made the rest of the room seem drab. Their mattress on the floor had a lumpy, beaten look.

She went back to the hall for Gina and carried her into the bedroom and set her in the crib. Gina stared all around her at the eyelet ruffles, the decals, the bars. What a shock, she seemed to be saying. How did this imprisonment come about?

It came about inch by inch. These things just wear you down.

This child had changed their lives past recognition, more than they had dreamed possible. You would think that someone so small could simply be fitted into a few spare crannies and the world could go on as usual, but it wasn't like that at all. From the start, she seemed to consume them. Even as a tiny infant she was aggressively sociable and noisy and enthusiastic, an insomniac who seldom took naps and struggled continually toward a vertical position. They would lay her down on her stomach for the night and instantly her head would bob up again, weaving and unsteady, her eyes so wide that her forehead seemed corrugated. She loved to be talked to, sung to, tossed in the air. As she grew older, she fell in love with Red Riding Hood's wolf and they had to give him up to her. If she slept at all, she slept with the wolf against her cheek and she dreamily twisted his red felt tongue. Periodically the tongue fell off and then she would go to pieces-crying and clinging to Emily till Emily sewed it back on. And she hated to be left. Hannah Miles, across the hall, was glad to babysit, but any time Emily and Leon went out, Gina wept as if her heart would break and Emily would have to stay. Or Leon would make her leave anyway, really insist, and she would go, but her thoughts remained with Gina, and all through the movie or whatever she would fidget, buttoning and unbuttoning her coat, not hearing a word. Then Leon would be angry with her and they'd have a fight and the outing would be wasted, but later when they returned, Gina would be wide awake and smiling, at eleven or twelve at night, reading books with Hannah and hardly noticing they were back.

They never asked, of course, whether she was worth it. They centered their lives on her. They could marvel forever at the small, chilly point of her nose, or her fat-ringed fingers or precisely cut mouth. When finally she fell asleep, the absence of all that fierce energy made the apartment feel desolate. Emily would drift through the rooms not knowing what to do next, though she'd wanted to do so much all day and never had a chance to begin. She wondered how they'd managed to produce such a child. She herself had always been so subdued and so anxious to please; Leon had Gina's fire but none of her joyous good nature. Where did she get that? She was a changeling. She had arrived with someone else's qualities. She was the gnome's baby, not theirs.

He stood in the laundromat doorway with his hat pulled low and he sank back into the darkness as they passed. Sometimes the hat was pointed, sometimes flat, sometimes broad-brimmed. Sometimes it seemed he had aged, was slackening, falling apart as certain people suddenly do; he was seen in gold-rimmed spectacles and Ms beard was cut to such a stubble that he might merely have neglected shaving himself. Then later he would reappear miraculously young again, the spectacles gone, the beard in full bloom. On occasion he was not gnomish at all but just a rather beakish, distinguished gentleman in suits so tidy you had the impression someone else had dressed him. On other occasions he could have stepped into a puppet show and not been out of place. He had a gait they would know anywhere, that seemed to belong to someone much younger-a reckless, bent-kneed, lunging gait, half running, landing on the balls of his feet. But once he was seen plodding out of a secondhand-clothing store with the resigned deliberation of a middle-aged man, and he had let his hair grow unsuitably long so it straggled in an unkempt and pathetic way over the back of his collar. At Christmas, Leon thought he saw him at a puppet show all the way over near Washington; but maybe it was just someone like him, he said. Then later he told Emily he'd been stupid-not for thinking it was he (the man was everywhere, after all), but for imagining there could be anyone else, anyplace, at any tune, the faintest bit like Morgan.

1971

1

Morgan's oldest daughter was getting married. It seemed he had to find this out by degrees; nobody actually told him. All he knew was that over a period of months one young man began visiting more and more often, till soon a place was set for him automatically at supper-time and he was consulted along with the rest of the family when Bonny wanted to know what color to paint the dining room. His name was Jim. He had the flat, beige face of a department-store mannequin, and he seemed overly fond of crew-necked sweaters. And Morgan couldn't think of a thing to say to him. All he had to do was look at this fellow and a peculiar kind of lassitude would seep through him. Suddenly he would be struck by how very little there was in this world that was worth the effort of speech, the entanglements of grammar and pronunciation and sufficient volume of voice.

Then Amy started beginning every sentence with "we." We think this and we hope that. And finally: when we're earning a little more money; when we find a good apartment; when we have children of our own. This just crept in, so to speak. No announcements were made. One Sunday afternoon Bonny asked Morgan if he thought the back yard was too small for the reception. "Reception?" Morgan said.

"And it's not just the size; if it's the weather," Bonny said. "What if it rains? You know how the weather can be in April."

"But this is already March" Morgan said.

We'll all sit down this evening," said Bonny, "and come to some decision." So Morgan went to his closet and chose an appropriate costume: a pinstriped suit he'd laid claim to after Bonny's father died. It stood out too far at the shoulders, maybe, but he thought it might have been what Mr. Cullen was wearing when Morgan asked him for permission to marry Bonny. And certainly he'd been wearing his onyx cufflinks. Morgan found the cufflinks in the back of a drawer, and he spent some time struggling to slip them through the slick, starched cuffs of his only French-cuffed shirt.

But when the four of them sat down for their discussion, no one consulted Morgan in any way whatsoever. All they talked about was food. Was it worthwhile calling in a caterer, or should they prepare the food themselves? Amy thought a caterer would be simplest. Jim, however, preferred that things be homemade. Morgan wondered how he could say that, having eaten so many suppers here. Bonny wasn't much of a cook. She leaned heavily on sherry-several glugs of it in any dish that she felt needed more zip. Everything they ate, almost, tasted like New York State cocktail sherry.

Morgan sat in the rocking chair and plucked out his beard, strand by strand. If he got up right now and left, he told himself, they might not even notice. He reflected on a long-standing grievance: there was one of Bonny's pregnancies that she'd forgotten to inform him about. It was the time she'd been expecting Liz, or maybe Molly. Bonny always said he was mistaken; of course she'd told him, she recalled it clearly. But Morgan knew better. He suspected, even, that she'd neglected to tell him on purpose: he tended to get annoyed by her slapdash attitude toward various birth-control methods. To his certain knowledge, the very first inkling he'd had of that pregnancy was when Bonny arrived in the kitchen one morning wearing the baggy blue chambray shirt she habitually used as a maternity smock. He was positive he would have remembered if she'd mentioned it to him.