Anne Tyler - Morgan's Passing

"Amy will start down the stairs," Bonny said. Evidently, they were planning the actual ceremony now. "Her father will meet her at the bottom and walk her to the center of the living room."

"Daddy, promise me you won't wear one of your hats," Amy said.

Morgan rocked in his chair and plucked on, thinking of the tall black fatherof-the-bride top hat he would purchase for the occasion. He knew just where he could find one: Tuxedo Tom's Discount Formal Wear. He began to feel slightly happier.

But later, when Jim and Amy had gone out, he sank into a spell of sadness. He thought of what a sunny child Amy had been when she was small. She'd had large, exaggerated curls swooping upward at each ear, so that she seemed to be wearing a Dutch cap. That Dutch-capped child, he thought, was whom he really mourned-not the present Amy, twenty-one years old, efficient secretary for a life-insurance company. He recalled how he had once worried over her safety. He'd been a much more anxious parent than Bonny. "You know," he told Bonny, "I used to be so certain that one of the children would die. Or all of them, even-I could picture that. I was so afraid they'd be hit by cars, or kidnapped, or stricken with polio. I'd warn them to look both ways, not to run with scissors, never to play with ropes or knives or sharp sticks. 'Relax,' you'd say. Remember? But now look: it's as if they died after all. Those funny little roly-poly toddlers, Amy in her OshKosh overalls-they're dead, aren't they? They did die. I was right all along. It's just that it happened more slowly than I'd foreseen."

"Now, dear, this is just an ordinary life development," Bonny told him.

He looked at her. She was seated at the kitchen table, working on the guest list for the wedding. On the wall above her was something like a hat rack-a row of short wooden arms. When you pressed a pearl pushbutton anywhere in this house, there was a clunk from the kitchen gong and one of the wooden arms would fly up, alerting a non-existent servant. Beneath each arm a yellowed label identified the room that had rung-or (in the case of bedrooms) the person. Mr. Armand. Mrs. Armand. Miss Caroline. Master Keith. Studying these labels, Morgan had the feeling that a younger, finer family lived alongside his, gliding through the hallways, calling for tea and hot-water bottles. Evenings, the mother sat by the fire in a white peignoir and read to her children, one on either side of her. A boy, a girl; how tidy. At dinner they discussed great books, and on Sunday they dressed up and went to church. They never quarreled. They never lost things or forgot things. They rang and waited serenely. They gazed beyond the Gowers with the placid, rapt expressions of theatre goers ignoring some petty disturbance in the row ahead.

"I'd like to invite Aunt Polly," Bonny said, "but that means Uncle Darwin, too, and he's so deaf and difficult." She was peering through black-framed, no-nonsense glasses, which she'd just started wearing for reading. Morgan said, "So did you die,' when you think of it."

"Me?"

"Where's that girl I used to take out walking? I used to hold on to your arm, high up, and you would look off elsewhere and get pink, but you wouldn't pull away." Bonny added a name to her list. She said, "Walking I don't remember that. I thought we always drove." He slid his fingers down the inside of her upper arm, where the skin was silkiest. The back of Ms hand brushed the weight of one breast. She didn't seem to notice. She said, "Luckily, Jim doesn't have many relatives."

"She must be marrying him out of desperation." Then she did look up. She said, "Couldn't you still love the girls anyhow? You don't stop loving people just because they change size."

"Of course I love them."

"Not the same way," she said. "It seems you get fixed on this one appearance of a person; I mean, this single idea you have," She clicked her ballpoint pen. "And anyway, why leap ahead so? They haven't all grown up. Molly and Kate are still in high school."

"No, no, they're gone, for all intents and purposes," Morgan said. "Out every evening, off somewhere, up to something… they're gone, all right." He brightened. "Aha!" he said. "Alone at last, my dollink!" But it called for too much effort. He drifted over to the stove, depressed, and lit a cigarette on a burner. "House feels so damn big, we needed a ride-'em vacuum cleaner."

"You always did want more closet space," Bonny told him.

"They've dumped their hamsters on us and gone away."

"Morgan. There were nine of us at dinner tonight, counting your mother and Brindle. When I was a little girl, any time there were nine at table we had to send downtown for Mattie Ida to come help serve."

"What we ought to do is move," Morgan said. "We could get a house in the country, maybe live off the land." He pictured himself in sabots and a rough blue peasant smock. The house would be a one-room cabin with a huge stone fireplace, a braided rug, and a daybed covered in some hand-woven fabric. Unbidden, Amy in her Dutch-cap curls bounced in the center of the day-bed. He winced. "I'll take an early retirement," he said. "Forty-five feels older than I'd thought it would. I'll retire and well have some time to ourselves. Won't that be nice?"

"Now, don't go off on one of your crazy schemes," Bonny told him, "You'd die of boredom, retiring. You'd feel useless."

"Useless?" Morgan said. He frowned.

But Bonny was on the track of something new, thoughtfully tapping her pen against her teeth. She said, "Morgan, in this day and age, do you believe the bride's mother would still give the bride a little talk?"

"Hmm?"

"What I want to know is, am I expected to give Amy a talk about sex or am I not?"

"Bonny, do you have to call it sex?"

"What else would I call it?"

"Well…"

"I mean, sex is what it is, isn't it?"

"Yes, but, I don't know…"

"I mean, what would you say? Is it sex, or isn't it?"

"Bonny, will you just stop hammering at me?"

"Anyhow," she said, returning to her list, "in this day and age, I bet she'd laugh in my face." Morgan rubbed his forehead with two fingers. Really, it occurred to him, if Bonny had been more serious, more responsible, none of this upheaval would be happening. Or at least it wouldn't be happening quite so soon. It seemed to him that she had let the children slip through her fingers in some sort of sloppy, casual, cheerful style that was uniquely hers. He recalled that once, while chaperoning Kate's sixth-grade class on a field trip to Washington, she'd lost all eight of her charges in the Smithsonian Institution. They'd been found among showcases full of savages, copying down the recipe for shrunken heads. At the school's annual mother-daughter picnic, where everyone else brought potato salad and lemonade, Bonny brought a sack of Big Macs and a thermos of chablis. Yes, and she had such a disastrous effect upon machinery; she had only to settle behind the steering wheel and instantly the car fell apart. Warning lights would blink, steam would issue from the radiator, the muffler would drop off, and hubcaps would roll in every direction and clang along the gutters and slither down storm drains. She'd make one simple right turn and the turn signal would never work again. No wonder he spent half his weekends on his back in the garage! And she'd passed all this on to the girls too. The first driving lesson he gave Amy, the left front window had slid down inside the door and could not be retrieved. For that he'd had to go to the dealer.

And then there was his sister, who hadn't been out of that bathrobe of hers since Christmas. It hung on her like old orchid petals, wilted, striated, heavy-smelling. And his mother's memory was failing more than ever now, though she flew into a fury if anyone hinted as much. At supper, proving her sharpness, she'd recite whole portions of "Hiawatha" or the Rubaiyat. "Come, fill the Cup…!" she'd start up out of nowhere, slamming a fork against her glass, and Brindle would say, "Oh, Jesus, not again," and all the others would groan and fall into their separate, disorderly factions around the table.