Anne Tyler - Morgan's Passing

"I can't."

"Just a short way. Just to be alone."

"Gina will start wondering." He sagged against the door.

"I don't know what to do," she said.

"Do?" He looked at her. She stood with her arms folded, gazing at some fixed point across the street. "I'm thinking of leaving," she said. "Getting out." It must be Leon again. Morgan thought she'd stopped being bothered by all that, by whatever it was… he had never quite understood, although he'd tried. It seemed he kept missing some clue. Were they talking about the same marriage? Emily, what is your problem, exactly? He sometimes wanted to ask, but he didn't. He leaned against the pickup door and listened carefully, tilting his Panama hat forward over his eyes.

"I'm even packed," she said, "or half-packed. I've been packed for years. This morning I woke up and thought, 'Why don't I just leave, then? Wouldn't it be simpler?' These clothes are so foldable and non-crushable. They take up a single drawer and they'd fit with no trouble at all in the — suitcase in the closet. I still have this cosmetic kit that I bought when I was first married. I'm set! It seems 1 always knew that I might have to be. I've worked it so I could grab my bag up any time and go." Morgan was interested. "Yes, yes," he said, nodding to himself. "I see what you mean." Emily rattled on, like somebody clacking away in a fever. "When I jog, you know what I imagine? I imagine I'm in training for some emergency-a forced flight, a national disaster. It's comforting to know that I'm capable of running several miles, Nights, sometimes, I wake with a jolt, scared to death, heart just racing. Then I tell myself, 'Now, Emily, you can manage. You are very good at surviving. You can run five miles at a stretch, if you have to, and your suitcase can be ready in thirty seconds flat-"

"What you need is a backpack," Morgan said. "An Army surplus backpack to leave your hands free." Emily said, "I am seventeen days overdue."

"Seventeen days!" Morgan said.

He thought at first she was referring to some new jogging record. Then even after he understood, he seemed to have trouble absorbing it. (It was years since he and Bonny had had to concern themselves with such things.) "Think of that!" he said, stalling for time, nodding more rapidly.

"Of course, it could be a false alarm."

"Oh, yes, a false alarm."

"Will you please stop echoing?" It hit him all at once. He straightened and yanked the truck's handle, and the door swung out, flooding Emily's face with light. She looked sleepy and creased; her eyes had adjusted to the dark. But she met his gaze firmly. "Emily," he said, "what are you telling me?"

"What do you think I'm telling you?" He noticed that her face was pinched, as if from fear. He saw this suddenly from her viewpoint-seventeen days of waiting, not telling a soul. He shut the door again and laid an arm around her, heavily. "You should have mentioned this earlier," he said.

"I'm scared of what Leon will say."

"Yes, well…" He coughed. "Ah… will he realize? That is, will he realize that, ah, this is not his doing?"

"Of course he will," Emily said. "He does know how to count." Morgan thought this over-all that it revealed. He patted her shoulder and said, "Well, don't worry, Emily."

"Maybe it's nerves," Emily said.

"Oh, yes. Nerves." He saw that he was echoing again and he quickly covered it up. "These things are vicious circles. What's the word I want? Self-perpetuating. The greater the delay, "the more nervous you become, of course, and so the delay is even greater and you he-come even more-"

"I do believe in abortion," Emily said, "but I don't believe in it for me."

"Oh?" he said, He frowned.

"For who, then?" he asked.

"I mean, I don't think I could go through with the actual process, Morgan."

"Oh, yes. Well-"

"I just couldn't do it. I couldn't."

"Oh. Well, naturally. Of course not," he said. "No, naturally not." He noticed that he was still patting her-an automatic gesture that was beginning to make his palm feel numb. "We shouldn't stay out here, Emily," he said. "You'd better go in now."

"I thought I was so careful," she told him. "I don't understand it." Bonny used to say that-long, long ago in a younger, sunnier world. He had been through it all before. He was a grandfather several times over. He steered Emily back to her building at a halting, elderly pace. "Yes, well, yes, well/' he said, filling the silence. On her front steps he thought to say, "But we could always ask a doctor. Get some tests."

"You know I can't stand doctors. I hate to just… hand myself over," Emily said.

"Now, now, don't upset yourself. Why, tomorrow you may find this was all a mistake-nerves or a miscalculation. You'll see." He kissed her good night, and held the door while she slipped inside, and smiled at her through the glass. He was calm as a rock. And why shouldn't he be?

None of this was happening.

Now every day that passed meant another blank on the calendar, another whispered conversation on the phone or in Cullen Hardware. Leon was back from Richmond; they couldn't talk in the apartment. But Emily's sheeted eyes, when Morgan stopped in for a visit, told him all he cared to know.

A week went by, and then two weeks. "What's the matter with Emily?" Bonny asked. "Have you seen her? She never comes around any more." Morgan thought of answering her. Just simply answering her. "Well," Bonny might say, "these things happen, I suppose." Or maybe, airily, "Oh, yes, I guessed as much." (She was his oldest friend. She had known him over thirty years.) But he said nothing-or something offhand, inconsequential; nothing that mattered.

Once he met Emily by accident in the Quick-Save Grocery. She was choosing a can of soup. Instantly, without even a greeting, they fell upon her signs and symptoms. ("I'm not the slightest bit morning-sick. And I would be, don't you think? I was terribly sick with Gina.") In the middle of the aisle Morgan set his fingertips precisely within the neckline of her leotard and gave a clinical frown into space, but her breasts were as small and tight as ever. He dismayed himself by longing, suddenly, to take her away to his faded office couch again. But he didn't suggest it. No, if this turned out to be a false alarm, he promised, they would become the brightest,^ gayest, most aboveboard of companions-he and Emily and Leon, racketing along hi a merry threesome, and he and Emily would not so much as hold hands except to… what, to help each other out of boats, through, the windows of burning buildings.

He turned these thoughts over continually, plowing them under, digging them up again, but the odd part was that he still felt sublimely, serenely distant. He seemed to have grown removed from everything. Even his own house, his family, he suddenly saw from outside. Often he paused in a doorway, say the door to his room, and looked in as if he were judging someone else's life. It was not a bad place: the window open, curtains fluttering. He observed how lovely Bonny was when she fell into helpless laughter, which she was always doing. He noticed that when the house was full of women, there was a sound like water flowing in and out of the upstairs rooms. His mother and his sister spoke their chosen lines, which were as polished as the chorus of a poem. "This is the time when the artichokes begin, those spiky little leaves with a lemon-butter sauce…"

"If Robert Roberts had not taken all my energy, all the care I ever had to give…" One of the twins- Susan, who had never married-was home recovering from a bout of hepatitis, and she lay peacefully hi her old spool bed, knitting Morgan a beautiful long stocking cap from every color of scrap wool in the house. As for his other daughters-why, it began to seem he'd finally found a place in their eyes, basking among their clamorous children. What had been embarrassing in a father, it appeared, was lovably eccentric in a grandfather. Yes, and on second thought, even his work was not so terrible-his hardware store smelling of wood and machine oils, and Butkins perched on a stool behind the counter. Butkins! He was a skeletal, hay-colored man, with a nose so pointed that it seemed a clear drop hung perpetually at its tip. He had once been young-twenty-three when Uncle Ollie hired him. In Morgan's mind he'd stuck at that age forever after, but now Morgan took a closer look and found him nearing forty, bowed by his wife's ill health and the death of his only child. He seemed collapsed at the center, cavernous. His eyes were the palest, milkiest blue that Morgan had ever seen, celestially mild and accepting. Morgan felt he had wasted so much time, had nearly let this man slip through his fingers unnoticed. He took to hunkering on his office steps and bemusedly smoking cigarettes while he studied Butkins at work, till Butkins grew flustered and spilled coins all over the counter as he was making change.