Anne Tyler - Morgan's Passing

"Well, sometimes," Leon said.

"When?" Emily asked him. Then she turned to Morgan and said, "We're not who you believe we are."

"Eh?"

"We're not who you imagine."

"Come look at Rip Van Winkle," Mrs. Apple said.

"We live like anyone else. We manage fine. We like to be left alone," said Emily. "Let me show you to the door."

"Oh, but Emily!" Mrs. Apple said. "He hasn't seen all the puppets!"

"He's seen enough."

"He wanted to buy a large number!"

"No, no, that's all right… I really must be going," Morgan said. "Thank you anyhow." Emily spun through the door, a swirl of black skirt, and he followed her. They went down the hallway single-file-Emily, Morgan, Leon, Mrs. Apple stayed behind, no doubt looking around at the puppets in bewilderment. "Maybe some other time?" she called after him.

"Yes, maybe so…" He skidded on a Tinker Toy and said, "Oh, excuse me," and lurched against the wall. He clapped a hand to his head. "I'd better go home and change," he said.

"Change?" Leon asked.

"Yes, I… need another hat." His voice was echoing now; they'd reached the stairs. But instead of starting down, he looked at the door across the landing. "Who lives there?" he asked.

"Joe and Hannah Miles," said Leon, but Emily said, "No one."

"Miles? Are they craftsmen also?"

"We'll see you to the street," Emily told him. She pushed forward, edging him toward the stairs, and when he took his first step down, she followed so closely that he felt hounded. "I don't understand you," she said. (He should have known. She would not veil anything; she was as uncurtained as her windows.) "What do you want of us? What are you after? Why did you trail us all those months and lurk in doorways and peer around corners?"

"Oh? You noticed?" Morgan said. He staggered with embarrassment and grabbed the banister.

"You could have come straight up and said hello, like ordinary people."

"Yes, but I was so… I'd built up this idea of you. I almost preferred watching, don't you see. My own household is impossible. Very confusing, very tedious," he said. He stopped, halfway down the last flight of stairs. "Oh, you think it's all so romantic, I suppose," he said. "Big-city doctor! Saving lives. But mostly it's a treadmill. I work too far downtown; I attract a low class of patient. Twice I've had my office robbed by addicts looking for drugs, and one of those times I was present. They tied my secretary to her chair with a raincoat belt and they made me go through all my desk drawers. It was unnerving. There I was, tumbling out sample packs of decongestants, sinus tablets, pediatric nosedrops… I'm not a brave man. I gave them all I had. I tell you this to show you what sort of existence I lead, Emily, Leon…" He was out of breath. He felt a white space inside his head, as if he were standing at an unaccustomed altitude. "Just hear what happened last summer," he said. "I had this patient who'd been stabbed. Stabbed in front of a Fells Point bar, something to do with a woman. They brought him in and woke me in the dead of night. That's the kind of practice I have-such fine patients. And no answering service, no condominium in Ocean City where I can vanish over the weekend… Anyhow. He had a long, shallow cut all down the left side, from the ribcage to the hipbone, fortunately clear of the heart. I laid him on the table in my office and stitched him up right then and there. Took me an hour and a quarter-a tiresome job, as you might imagine. Then just as I'm knotting the last stitch, wham! The door bursts open. In comes the man who stabbed him. Pulls out a knife and rips him down the right side, ribcage to hipbone. Back to the needle and thread. Another hour and a quarter." Leon gave a sudden snort of laughter, but Emily just nudged Morgan forward. Morgan resumed his descent, leaning heavily on the banister like someone old and rheumatic. He said, "They come to me with headaches, colds, black eyes… self-healing things. A man who does sedentary work-a taxi driver, say- will spend the weekend moving furniture and then can me out of bed on a Sunday night. 'Doc, I got the most terrible backache. Do you think it could be a disk? A fusion? Will I need an operation?' For this I went to medical school!"

"Here," said Emily. They had reached the front door. She pushed it open for him and held out her hand, "Goodbye," she told him. Leon grinned anxiously behind her, as if trying to ease the insult. Morgan took her hand and was startled by its lightness and its dryness.

"You don't want to be friends at all, do you?" he said.

"No," Emily told him.

"Ah," he said. "And why — would that be?"

"I don't like how you try to get into our lives. I hate it! I don't like being pried into."

"Emily," Leon said.

"No, no," Morgan told him. "It's quite all right. I understand." He looked away, toward his dusty, sagging car. He had no feelings whatsoever. It seemed he'd been emptied, "Maybe you could meet my wife," he said with an effort. "Would you like to meet Bonny? Have I told you about her? Or you might like my children. I have very nice children, very normal, very ordinary; they seem determined to be ordinary… Two are in high school. One's grown, really, a secretary; and four others are in college, here and there. Most of the year, they're gone. We hardly hear from them. But that's the way it is, right? Every parent says that. You can see that I'm a family man. Does that help? No, I guess it doesn't." It seemed he was still holding Emily's hand. He dropped it. "The oldest girl's getting married," he said. "I'm not a doctor. I work in a hardware store." Emily said, "What?"

"I manage Cullen Hardware."

"But… you delivered our baby!" she said.

"Ah, well," he told her, "I haven't witnessed three of my daughters* births for nothing." He patted all his pockets, hunting cigarettes, but when he found a pack, he just stood holding it and looking into their stunned faces. "That stabbing business, well, I read it in the paper," he said. "I presented myself untruthfully. I do that often, in fact. I often find myself giving a false impression. It's not something I intend, you understand. It almost seems that other people conspire with me, push me into it. That day you called for a doctor in the house: no one else came forward. There was this long, long silence. And it seemed like such a simple thing-offer some reassurance, drive you to the hospital. I had no inkling I'd actually have to deliver a baby. Events just… rolled me forward, so to speak." He wished they would say something. All they did was stare at him. Meanwhile a girl in an old-fashioned dress climbed the front steps and said, "Hello, Emily, Leon," but they didn't even glance at her, or move aside when she slipped past them and through the open door.

"Please. It's not entirely my fault," he said. "Why are people so willing to believe me? Just tell me that. And this is what's depressing: they'll believe me all the quicker if I tell them something disillusioning. I might say, for instance, that being a movie star is not what it's cracked up to be. I'll say the lights are so hot that my make-up runs, and there's forever this pinkish-gray stain around the inside of my collar that my wife despairs of Clorox has no effect on it; not even Wisk does, though she's partially solved the problem by prevention. What she does, you see, is rub my collar with a bar of white bath soap "before I put a shirt on. Yes, that seems to work out fairly well, I'll say."

"This is crazy," Leon told him.

"Yes," said Morgan.

"You must be crazy!" But Emily said, "Well, I don't know. I see what he means, in a way." Both men turned to stare at her. Leon said, "You do?"

"He just… has to get out of his life, sometimes," she said.

Then Morgan gave a long, shaky sigh and sank down on the stoop. "My oldest daughter's getting married," he said. "Could I sit here with you and smoke a cigarette?" 1973 The newspaper said, Crafts Revival in Baltimore? Festival Begins June 2. There was a picture of Henry Prescott, ankle-deep in wood chips, carving one of his decoys. There was a picture of Leon Meredith holding up a puppet, with his wife beside him and his daughter at his feet. He was a grim, handsome, angular man, and his mouth was sharply creviced at the corners. He was not a young boy any more. It took a photo to make Emily see that. She placed the paper on the kitchen table, pushing away several breakfast dishes, and leaned over it on both elbows to study it more closely. The porous texture of the newsprint gave Leon a dramatic look-all hollows and steel planes. Next to him, Emily seemed almost featureless. Even Gina failed to show how special she was.