Anne Tyler - Morgan's Passing

Useless? Living this life of his was such hard work that even if he retired tomorrow, he had no hope of feeling useless.

Amy stood at the top of the stairs, wearing white and carrying roses. The hall window behind her lit her long, filmy skirt. At the bottom of the stairs Morgan waited with his hand on the newel post. He wore his new top hat and a pure-black suit from Second Chance. (There'd been a little fuss about the hat, "but he'd held his ground.) He had trimmed his beard. Gold-rimmed spectacles (window glass) perched on his nose. He felt like Abraham Lincoln.

One of Morgan's failings was that formal, official proceedings-weddings, funerals-never truly affected him. They just didn't seem to penetrate. He'd lain awake half of last night mourning his daughter, but the fact was that now, with the ceremony about to begin, all that was on his mind was Amy's roses. He had distinctly heard the wedding-dress lady tell her to carry them low, at arm's length-too low, even, she said, because if Amy were nervous at all she'd tend to lift them higher. And now, before the music had even started, Amy had her bouquet at breast level. This didn't trouble Morgan (he couldn't see that it made the slightest difference), but he wondered why nervousness should cause people to raise their arms. Was it something to do with protecting the heart? Morgan experimented. He clasped his hands first low, then high. He didn't find the one any more comforting than the other. With his hands folded just beneath his beard, he tried a dipping rhythmic processional, humming to himself as he sashayed across the hall. Daddy" Amy hissed. Morgan dropped Ms hands and hurried back to the newel post, Kate set the needle on the record. The wedding march began in mid-note. In the living room the guests grew suddenly still; all Morgan heard was the creaking of their rented chairs. He smiled steadily up at Amy, his spectacles catching the light and flashing two white circles across her face. With her hand trailing down the banister, weightless as a leaf, Amy set a pointed satin slipper in the center of each step. Her skirt caused a clinking sound among the brass rods that anchored the Persian carpet. Yesterday morning Bonny had taken a red Magic Marker and colored in the bare spots in the carpet. Then she'd used a brown Magic Marker for the rips in the leather armchair. (Sometimes Morgan felt he was living in one of those crayoned paper houses that the twins used to make.) Amy reached the hallway and took his arm. She was trembling slightly. He guided her into the living room and down the makeshift aisle.

On this same stringy rug he had walked her for hours when she was just newborn. He had nestled her head on his shoulder and paced the length of the rug and back, growling lullabies. The memory didn't stir him. It was just there, just another, lower layer in this room that was full of layers. He led her up to Bonny's minister, a man he disliked. (He disliked all ministers.) Amy dropped his arm and took a place next to what's-his-name, Jim. Morgan stepped back and stood with his feet planted apart, his hands joined behind him. He rocked a little to the lullaby in his head.

"Who gives this woman to be married?" the minister said. From the way the question rang in the silence, Morgan suspected it might have been asked once before without his noticing. He seemed to have missed part of the service. "Her mother and I do," he said. It would have been more accurate to say, "Her mother does." He turned and found his seat next to Bonny, who was looking beautiful and calm in a blue dress with a wide scoop neckline that kept slipping off one or the other of her shoulders. She laid a hand on top of his. Morgan noticed a gray thread of cobweb dangling from the ceiling.

Jim put a ring on Amy's finger. Amy put a ring on Jim's finger. They kissed. Morgan thought of a plan: he would go live with them in their new apartment. They didn't know a thing, not a thing. No doubt they'd have broken all their kitchen machines within a week and their household accounts would be a shambles, and then along would come Morgan to repair and advise. He would go as an old man, one of those really bereft old men with no teeth, no job, no wife, no family. In some small area he would act helpless, so that Amy would feel a need to care for him. He would arrive, perhaps, without buttons on Ms shirt, and would ask her to sew them on for him. He had no idea how to do it himself, he would tell her. Actually, Morgan was very good at sewing on buttons. Actually, he not only sewed on his own buttons but also Bonny's, and the girls', and patched their jeans and altered their hemlines, since Bonny wasn't much of a seamstress. Actually, Amy was aware of this. She was also aware that he was not a toothless old man and that he did have a wife and family. The trouble with fathering children was, they got to know you so well. You couldn't make the faintest little realignment of the facts around them. They kept staring levelly into your eyes, eternally watchful and critical, forever prepared to pass judgment. They could point to so many places where you had gone permanently, irretrievably wrong.

There'd been a compromise on the food. Bonny had ordered several trays from the deli, and then Morgan had picked up some cheese and some crackers which the girls had put together this morning. He'd been upset to discover that there was apparently no discount outlet for gourmet cheeses. "Do you know what these things cost?" he asked the groom's father, who had a hand poised over a cracker spread with something blue-veined. Then he wandered across the yard to check on the Camembert. It was surrounded by three young children-possibly Jim's nephews. "This one smells like a stable," the smallest was saying.

"It smells like a gerbil cage."

"It smells like the… elephant house at the zoo!" The weather had turned out fine, after all. It was a warm, yellow-green day, and daffodils were blooming near the garage. A smiling brown maid, on loan from Uncle Ollie, bore a tray of drinks through the crowd, picking her way carefully around the muddy patches where the spring reseeding had not yet taken hold. The bride stood sipping champagne and listening to an elderly gentleman whom Morgan had never seen before. His other daughters-oddly plain in their dress-up clothes-passed around sandwiches and little things on toothpicks, and his mother was telling the groom's mother why she lived on the third floor. "I started out on the second floor," she said, "but moved on account of the goat."

"I see," said Mrs. Murphy, patting her pearls.

"This goat was housebroken, naturally, but the drawback was that I am the only person in this family who reads Time magazine. In fact, I have a subscription. And as coincidence would have it, the goat had only been trained on Time magazine. I mean, he would only… I mean, if the necessity arose, the only place he was willing to… was on a Time magazine spread on the floor. He recognized that red border, I suppose. And so you see if I were to lay my magazine aside even for a second, why, along this animal would come and just… would up and… would…"

"He'd pee all over it," Morgan said. "Tough luck if she wasn't through reading it."

"Oh, yes," Mrs. Murphy said. She took a sip from her glass.

At Morgan's elbow, in a splintered wicker chair, an unknown man sat facing in the other direction. Maybe he was from the groom's side. He had a bald spot at the back of his head; fragile wisps of hair were drawn across it. He raised a drink to his lips. Morgan saw his weighty signet ring. "Billy?" Morgan said. He went around to the front of the chair. Good God, it was Billy, Sonny's brother.

"Nice wedding, Morgan," Billy said. "I've been to a lot, you know-mostly my own. I'm an expert on weddings." He laughed. His voice was matter-of-fact, but to Morgan it was the misplaced, eerie matter-of-fact ness sometimes encountered in dreams. How could this be Billy? What had happened here? Morgan had last seen Billy not a month ago. He said, "Billy, from the back of your head I didn't know you."