Anne Tyler - Morgan's Passing

She glanced over at Morgan. Morgan smiled seraphically and blew out a whoosh of smoke.

"But I think he's trying to give it up," said Emily.

"Oh, I hope so!" Bonny said. "Why! It takes so much ingenuity to manage some of that foolishness… think what he could accomplish if he used that brain for sensible things! If he straightened out. If he decided to go straight,"

"Not much," said Morgan cheerfully.

"What, dear?"

"There's not much I could accomplish. What do you imagine I'd be doing instead?"

"Oh, why… just attending to things. I mean, attending to where you belong." She turned to Emily. "There's nothing wrong with a hardware store. Is there? My family's always done well in hardware; it's nothing to be sneezed at. But Uncle Ollie says Morgan's heart's not in it. What's the good of a store, he says, where you have to positively wrest the merchandise from the manager? Assuming you can find the manager. I tell Uncle Ollie, 'Oh, leave him alone. Cullen Hardware is not the be-all and end-all,' I tell him, but it's true that Morgan could get more narrowed in. He doesn't know how to say no. He never refuses to be swept along."

"Mostly it's muscles," Morgan said.

This must have been something he'd told her before; Bonny rolled her eyes at Emily, Morgan turned to Emily and repeated it. "It's a matter of muscles," he said.

"I don't understand."

"A matter of following where they lead me. Have you ever gone out to the kitchen, say, and then forgotten what for? You stand in the kitchen and try to remember. Then your wrist makes a little twisting motion. Oh, yes! you say. That twist is what you'd do to turn a faucet on. You must have come for water! I just trust my muscles, you see, to tell me what I'm here for. To drop me into my true activity one day. I let them lead me."

"He lets them lead him into saying he's a glass-blower," Bonny said, "and a tugboat captain for the Curtis Bay Towing Company, and a Mohawk Indian high-rise worker. And that's just what I happen to hear; heaven knows what more there is." Her lips twitched, as if she were hiding some amusement. "You're walking down the street with him and this total stranger asks him when the International Brotherhood of Magicians is meeting next. You're listening to a politician's speech and suddenly you notice Morgan on the platform, sitting beside a senator's wife with a carnation in his buttonhole. You're waiting for your crabs at Lexington Market and who's behind the counter but Morgan in a rubber apron, telling the other customers where he caught such fine oysters. It seems he has this boat that was handed down from an uncle on his mother's side, a little bateau with no engine-"

"Engines disturb the beds," said Morgan, "And I don't like mechanical tonging rigs, either. What was good enough for my uncle on my mother's side is good enough for me, I say." Bonny smiled at him and shook her head. "You step out for two minutes to buy milk, leaving him safe home in his pajamas, and coming back you pass him on the corner in a satin cap and purple satin shirt, telling four little boys the secret that made him the only undefeated jockey in the history of Pimlico. A jockey, six feet tall! Why do they all believe him? He " never used a crop, you see, but only whispered in the horse's ear. He whispered something that sounded like a crop, what was the word?"

"Scintillate," Morgan said.

"Oh, yes," said Bonny. She laughed.

Morgan trotted in his chair, holding imaginary reins. "Scintillate, scintillate," he whispered, and Bonny laughed harder and wiped her eyes.

"He's impossible," she told Emily. "He's just… impossible to predict, you see."

"I can imagine he must be," Emily said politely.

She was beginning to like Bonny (her pink, merry face, and the helpless way she sank back in her chair), but she thought less of Morgan. It had never occurred to her that he knew exactly how people saw him, and that he enjoyed their astonishment and perhaps even courted it. She frowned at him. Morgan pulled his nose reflectively.

"She's right," he said. "I make things difficult. But I plan to change. Hear that, Bonny?"

"Oh, do you, now?" Bonny said. She stood up to raise the kitchen window. "I don't know what to make of my garden," she said, looking out at the yard. "I was certain I'd planted vegetables someplace, but it seems to be coming up all flowers."

"I mean it," Morgan said. He told Emily, "She doesn't believe me. Bonny, don't you see what's here in front of you? Here's Emily Meredith; I brought her home. I brought her to our house. I told her and Leon, both, exactly who I was. I told about you and the girls. They know about Amy's new baby and the time Kate smashed the car."

"Is that right?" Bonny asked Emily.

Emily nodded.

"Well, I can't think what for," Bonny said. "I can't think why he bored you with all that."

"I'm combining my worlds!" Morgan said, and he raised his coffee cup to Bonny.

But Bonny said, "There's a catch to it somewhere. There's something missing. I don't understand what he wants." Emily didn't understand either. She shook her head; Bonny shook hers. In fact, it seemed that Bonny and Emily were the old friends and Morgan was the newcomer. He sat slightly apart, perched under his helmet like an elf under a mushroom, turning his face from one to the other while the women watched, narrow-eyed, to see what he was up to.

1975

Even when Morgan fell asleep, he didn't truly lose consciousness. Part of him slept while the rest of him stayed alert and jittery, counting things-thumbtacks, mattress buttons, flowers on a daughter's dress, holes in a pegboard display of electrical fittings. A plumber came in and ordered some pipes: six elbows and a dozen nipples. "Certainly," said Morgan, but he couldn't help laughing. Then he was competing in a singing contest. He was singing a song from the fifties called "Moments to Remember." He knew the words, but was unable to pronounce them properly. The ballroom prize we almost won came out the barroom brawl we almost won. His partner was not a good dancer anyway, and in fact they were nowhere close to winning. Why! His partner was Laura Lee Keller, the very first girl he had ever loved-someone he had lost track of long, long before the days of "Moments to Remember." After the prom, he and Laura Lee had driven to the beach with half the senior class and lain kissing on a blanket by the ocean. Still, even now, even after all these years, the sound of the ocean reminded him of possibilities unfolding: everything and untried yet, just around the corner. He opened his eyes and heard the ocean just a few blocks distant, the very same ocean he'd lain beside with Laura Lee, but he himself was middle-aged and irritable and so was Laura Lee, he supposed, wherever she was; and his mouth had a scorched taste from smoking too much the night before.

It was six o'clock in the morning in Bethany Beach, Delaware, in the buckling tarpaper cottage they rented from Uncle Ollie every July. Tongue-and groove walls, painted a dingy blue too long ago, rose high above the swaybacked bed. A tattered yellow shade rustled in the window. (Where else but near the ocean would you see this kind of window-the cheap aluminum frame stippled by salt air, the bellying screen as soft and sleazy as some synthetic fabric? Where else would the screen doors and porches have those diagonal wooden insets at the corners, so that no right angles appeared to exist within earshot of the Atlantic?) The room was full of castoffs: a looming wardrobe faced with a flecked, metallic mirror; a bow-fronted bureau topped with a mended dresser scarf (every one of the drawers stuck, and several of the cut-glass knobs were missing); a pink shag rug as thin and wrinkled as a bathmat; and a piecrust table beside the bed with a cracked brown plastic clock radio on the doily at its center. Morgan sat up and switched on the radio. He had just missed the Six O'clock Sermonette; Guy and Ralna were singing "What a Friend We Have in Jesus." Next to him, Bonny stirred and said, "Morgan? What on earth…?" He lowered the volume a little. He inched out of bed, took a sombrero from the wardrobe, and put it on without looking in the mirror. Barefoot, in his underpants, he slogged down the hall to the kitchen. Already the air was so warm and heavy that he felt used up.