Anne Tyler - Morgan's Passing

"How could I have filled it wrong? I used what they said to use, D size."

"Yes, but the poles are not reversed, Gina."

"What poles?"

"You know that batteries are polarized," he said.

Gina said, "No… but I have to leave now, Morgan." She was jittery and restless, twisting a piece of hair, glancing toward the hall. Joshua had worked his way to a bureau and was tugging a satin strap from a drawer. Morgan noticed none of this. He was busy with the flashlight.

"Observe," he said, holding up a battery. "A plus sign on the positive end. A minus sign on the negative end." Emily felt wrenched by his elderly, instructive tone of voice. She came over to him and kissed his cheek.

"Never mind that," she said to him. Gina, run say hello to Daddy. "We're making Leon wait. We'll fix your flashlight." Gina left-released, like something snapped from a rubber band. Morgan shook his head and dropped the batteries in place. "Eleven years old and doesn't know batteries are polarized," he said. "How will she manage in the modern world?"

"Morgan," she said, just above a whisper. "Leon wants to keep her."

"Keep her? Hand me that cap, please."

"You don't think he can make us give her up or anything, do you? In some court of law?"

"Nonsense," Morgan said, screwing the flashlight shut.

"Morgan, I don't understand how he and I switched sides here," Emily said. "He used to claim I tied him down. Now all at once he's going to work in a bank, and I lead an unstable life, he says."

"How can you have a more stable life than ours?" Morgan asked her. He dropped the flashlight into Gina's trunk, closed the lid, and snapped the locks down.

But in the living room it seemed that everyone was conspiring to seem as unstable as possible. Gina was sitting on Leon's knee, which she had not done in years. She looked awkward and precarious. Louisa was knitting her eternal scarf. The dog was asking to go out: he paced up and down in front of Leon, his toenails clicking on the floor. And Brindle had somehow worked around to her favorite subject: Horace. "I never thought we had much in common because he was a gardening man, always messing in his garden.

He owned the rowhouse next to ours when I was just a girl. We only had a little puddle of a yard, but he had a coiner lot, with roses and azaleas out back and some of those tiny fruit trees that you flatten to a wall-tortured, I always said. I never liked that kind of tree. And a real little fountain with a statue of a goddess. Well, not real; just plaster or something, but still. He came out every morning and watered his flowers, pruned his shrubs if the merest sprig was out of place. I laughed at him for that. Then he brought me fresh-picked roses with the dew and the aphids still on them and I would say, 'Oh, thanks,' hardly caring, but if he didn't come I started noticing. What doesn't leave an empty space, if you're used to it and it goes? I think he was lonesome. He said 1 put him in mind of his plaster goddess, but that just made me laugh more. One of her bosoms was hanging out and she didn't have a nipple. And he was an old fellow, really, or seemed old then, these knotted white legs in gardening shorts…. but when he came calling he wore trousers, and a white shirt with one of those collars that spread wide, like wings. Oh, I sincerely miss him still," she said, "and I suppose I always will. Now it's me that's bringing roses, when I go to visit his grave."

"Everything's packed," Emily told Leon.

"Good." He set Gina aside and stood up.

"What's funniest," said Brindle, rising also, "is I'm older now than Horace was when he started courting me. Can you believe it?" Leon gave Emily a long, stem look. It was plain what he was saying: Call this a fit life for a child? As if she understood, Louisa lifted her chin and fixed him with a glare.

"Usually," she told him, "I would be in a much more elegant place, I want you to know." Then Brindle wheeled on her and said, "Oh, Mother, hush. Wouldn't every one of us? Be quiet." Still Emily wouldn't answer what Leon was asking her.

Leon and Morgan together carried everything out to the hall. Harry led the way, in a Joyful rush, and Gina followed with her sleeping bag. Emily had Joshua astride her hip. Already, so soon after his bath, he had a used look. Emily pressed her cheek to him and drew in his smell of milk and urine and baby powder. She trailed the others down the stairs, "I brought my father's Buick because I knew we'd need the luggage space," Leon was telling Morgan. "But maybe still I'll have to get a rope from somewhere. I'm not so sure the lid will close."

"You want to keep a rope in your car at all times,'* Morgan said. "Or better yet, one of those nylon-coated cords with hooks at either end. Simply go to any discount camping store, you see…" Leon set down his end of the trunk and rummaged through his pockets for the keys. The sun gave his hair a hard blue shine, like bits of coal. Emily studied him from the doorway. The odd thing was that although she no longer loved him, she had the feeling this was only another step in their marriage: his opening his father's Buick, Morgan helping him load the trunk in, Gina tossing her sleeping bag alongside. They were linked, in some ways, forever. He turned back to her and held out a hand. It was probably the first time in her life that she had shaken hands with him. "Emily" he said, "think about my suggestion."

"I can't," she said. She lifted the baby's weight. Barefoot, with one hip slung out, she felt countrified and disadvantaged.

"Just think about if. Promise." Instead of answering, she went over to the car and bent to kiss Gina through the window. "Honey, be careful," she said. "Have a good time. Call me if you're homesick; please call."

"I will."

"Come back," she said.

"I will, Mama." Emily stepped away from the car, and stood in the crook of Morgan's arm, smiling hard and holding Josh very close.

"I've decided to become a writer," Bonny said. "I've always had a bent in that direction. I'm writing a short story composed entirely of thirty years' worth of check stubs and budget-book entries."

"What kind of story would that make?" Emily wondered. She sat down in the nearest kitchen chair, holding the receiver to her ear.

"You'd be surprised at how a plot emerges. I mean, checks to the diaper service, then to the nursery schools, then to the grade schools… but it's sad to see things were so cheap once. It seems pathetic that I spent ten dollars and sixteen cents on groceries for the second week of August nineteen fifty-one. Did Morgan see my personal?"

"What personal?" Emily asked.

(Of course he'd seen it.) "My personal in the classified section. Don't tell me he doesn't read the papers any more."

"Oh, did you put a personal in?"

"It said, MORGAN G.: All is known. Didn't he see it?"

"Morgan can't be bothered reading every notice in the paper."

"I thought that would really get him," Bonny said. "How he would hate for all to be known!" She was right. He'd hated it. He'd said, "What does this mean? Of course I realize it must be Bonny's doing, but… do you think it might be someone else? No, of course it's Bonny. What does she mean, all is known? What's known? What is she talking about?"

"He likes to think he's going through life as a stranger," Bonny said.

Emily said, "I believe I hear the baby crying."

"Sometimes," Bonny said, "I wonder if there's even any point in blaming him. It's the way he is, right? It's in his genes, or… None of his family has ever seemed quite normal to me. I didn't know his father, of course, but what kind of man must he have been? Killing himself for no good reason. And his grandfather… and his great-great-uncle! Has he told you the story of his great-great-uncle? Uncle Owen, the black sheep. What would it take to be the black sheep of that family? You wonder. No one ever says, if they know. This was when the family was still m Wales. Uncle Owen was such an embarrassment, they sent him off to America. Sort of a… remittance man, is that what they call them?"