Morgan's Passing (13 page)

Leon had stopped chewing. Emily felt her chest tightening up. Victor was smaller than Leon, and so young and meek he would never hit back. She imagined him cowering against the window, shielding his head with his arms, but she didn't know how to step in and stop this.

“I realize I'm not as old as Emily,” Victor said, “but I could take much better care of her. I would treat her better; I'd appreciate her; I'd sit admiring her all day long, if you want to know. We'd live a real life, not like this, with her ducked over her sewing machine and you off brooding in some corner, paying her no attention, holding some grudge that no one can guess at … Well, I'll say it right out: I want to take Emily away with me.”

Leon turned and looked at Emily. She saw that he wasn't angry at all. He was relaxed and amused, smiling a tolerant, kindly smile. “Well, Emily?” he said. “Do you want to go away with Victor?”

She felt suddenly flattened.

“Thank you, Victor,” she said, pressing her palms together. “It's nice of you, but I'm fine as I am, thank you.”

“Oh,” said Victor.

“I appreciate the thought.”

“Well,” Victor said, “I didn't want to sneak around about it.”

Then he sat back down on the windowsill and picked up his plate of beans.

The next morning he was gone—Victor and his tangle of blankets and his canvas backpack and his cardboard carton of LP records. He hadn't even said goodbye to Mrs. Apple. Well, it was a relief, in a way. How could they act natural after that? And she and Leon did need to be on their own. They were a married couple; it
began to seem that they really were married. She was starting to think about a baby. Leon didn't want one, but in time he would come around. They could use Victor's room for a workshop now, and then for the baby later on. It was lucky Victor had left, in fact.

But she hated how his woodsy, brown boy-smell hung in the empty room for days after he had gone.

Several times in Emily's life, similar things had happened. Men had seemed to affix themselves to her—but not to her personally, she thought. What they liked was their idea of her. She remembered a boy in her logic class who used to write her notes asking if she would take down her hair for him. Her hair: a bunch of dead cells that had nothing to do with her. “Think of it as longer, thinner fingernails,” she had written back coolly. She disliked being seen from outside that way—as someone with blond hair, someone with an old-fashioned face. Once, in New York, a man had started eating every day at the restaurant where she worked, and any time she so much as passed his table he would tell her about his ex-wife, who had also worn braids on top of her head. It was a continuing story: Emily would bring his rolls and he would say, “On our second date we went to the zoo.” She'd refill his coffee cup and he would say, “I'm pretty certain she loved me to begin with.” After a couple of weeks he went away, but Emily couldn't forget the ex-wife. She was Emily's other self; they would have understood each other, but she had slipped off and left Emily to take the blame. Now, with Victor, Emily wondered who he'd had in mind. Not Emily, she was sure—poking around in her linty old clothes, hunting up noses for her puppets. It must have been someone else who looked like Emily but had the capacity for a greater number of people in her life. Poor Victor! It was a pity, Emily thought. She was surprised at how much she missed him. She could not imagine loving anyone but Leon, but when she'd put a puppet together and longed for someone to try him out on, she thought of Victor and their squeaky-voiced duets.
She remembered Beauty's sisters clowning around at that first birthday party while Leon paced the floor.

It wasn't so easy to clown around with Leon.

4

S
he dressed Gina in a T-shirt, pink corduroy overalls, and a snowsuit. She buckled her little red shoes on her feet. Gina was impatient to get going. “Can we swing on the swings?” she asked.

“Not today, honey.”

“But I want to swing on the swings.”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

“Why
can't we swing on the swings?”

She was almost two now. Terrible Two's: they had minds all their own. But that could be said of Gina at any age. Somehow, this one small child kept both of her parents continually occupied and teetering on the edge of exhaustion. They must be doing something wrong. It didn't look so hard for other people.

Emily put a coat on and tied a scarf over her hair. It was February, a damp, cold day. Even the apartment was cold. She poked her head into the kitchen to say goodbye to Leon. He was sitting at the chipped enamel table they'd bought from Goodwill, reading the
Village Voice
. “Leon?” she said. “I'm taking Gina for a walk.”

“You want me to come along?”

“Oh, no, I'll be back soon.”

He nodded and returned to his paper. Emily led Gina out the door. They went down the creaking stairway, past the side entrance of Crafts Unlimited, through the
glass door at the front of the building. She checked the Laundromat across the street. No one was there. She hoisted Gina into her arms and set off toward Beacon Avenue. Gina kept struggling to get down; she liked to go places under her own steam. (It took her all day.) By now she was so heavy that it was difficult to hold on to her. Emily went faster than she'd intended to, pulled forward by Gina's tilted weight. Her slippers made a rustling, patting sound.

They arrived at the E-Z Cafeteria five minutes early, but Leon's mother was already waiting, seated alertly at the foremost table with her hands crossed over her purse. When she saw Emily (when she saw Gina, really), she seemed to open like a flower. Her face lifted, her hands uncrossed themselves, and the feathers on her hat stirred. “Ah!” she cried. She rose and brushed her cheek against Emily's. “I wasn't sure you'd come,” she told Emily. “I didn't know if you'd want to bring her out in this weather.”

“Oh, she's out in any weather,” Emily said.

Mrs. Meredith settled Gina in the high chair she'd already wheeled up. “Was she cold?” she crooned. “Did her little face get frozen?” She unwrapped her like a package, and patted Gina's thick, dark hair. “Oh, exactly like Leon's hair,” she said. (She always did.) “Will you look at how she's grown? Just in this one month she's grown so that I never would have known her. Though of course I'd know her anywhere,” she said, contradicting herself. Gina gazed at her reflectively. She was always quieter in her grandmother's presence.

The E-Z Cafeteria was not Mrs. Meredith's style, but it was one place they could manage Gina. They could wheel her down the food line instead of waiting for their order to arrive, and they could leave without delay any time she got restless. It had taken them a while to figure this out. They'd started off at the Elmwood—Mrs. Meredith's suggestion, a place near Towson, to which Emily had to travel by bus. It was the only Baltimore restaurant
Mrs. Meredith knew of. And, to be fair, she'd had no idea she was inviting a baby to lunch as well.

What had happened was, when Emily got married she had naturally informed her Great-Aunt Mercer, back in Taney. Aunt Mercer had not been very pleased, but she'd made the best of it. On her thick, silver-rimmed stationery, which smelled as if she'd kept it in her basement for the last ten years, she wrote to ask Emily who this young Meredith might be.
What's his daddy's name? Would I be likely to know any of his people? He isn't one of those
Nashville
Merediths, is he?
And once she had her answers, of course she felt duty-bound to write his parents a get-acquainted note. Next Leon received a letter from his mother, sent direct to his New York address:
Mr. Leon Meredith
. No mention of Emily. He threw it away unopened. “Oh, Leon!” Emily said. It was true she wasn't comfortable with his parents, but you couldn't just discard your only relatives. Leon said, “I told you that was a mistake, writing your aunt. I said it would be.” And the letter stayed in the wastebasket.

They moved to Baltimore, but the letters followed, for all his mother had to do was ask Aunt Mercer for his new address. And Leon went on throwing the letters away. Maybe eventually he'd have opened one (this couldn't last forever, could it?), but then the Merediths did something unforgivable. They gave his forwarding address to his draft board.

It wasn't malicious, Emily was certain, but Leon thought it was. “That's my parents for you,” he said. “They'd rather have me dead in the jungle than alive and happy without them.” He went on cursing them even after he failed the physical. One leg was found to be an inch and a half shorter than the other, the result of a broken thighbone in his childhood. No one had ever noticed it before. He returned with a painful limp and said, “I'm free, but I won't forget what they tried to do to me.” And he continued throwing their letters away.

If Emily's name had been on the envelopes too, she'd have opened them. She was pregnant by then and wishing for her mother. Aunt Mercer was no use—with her dim, steely handwriting:
The crocuses are late this year and the rodents have been at my galanthus bulbs
—and Mrs. Apple was sympathetic but had no recollection of childbirth. (“Perhaps I was put to sleep,” she said. “Do they give anesthesia for such things? I may have been asleep the whole nine months, in fact.”) Emily dreamed that Mrs. Meredith would suddenly arrive in person, miraculously plumper and more motherly, and she'd fold Emily into her lap and let her be a daughter again. But she never did.

Then, three months after Gina's birth, there it was:
Mrs. Leon Meredith
. Emily marveled at how long it had taken. She smuggled the letter into the bathroom and locked the door behind her to read it.
I know it must be you who's keeping our boy from us. I saw from the start you were a cold little person. But he is our only child. Think how we must feel
.

Emily was stunned. She couldn't believe that anyone would be so unfair. Her eyes blurred and the sheets of bricks shimmered in the window.

Why are you saying these things?
she wrote back.
I have nothing to do with any of this and I don't understand it. It's between you and Leon
.

His mother said,
It seems you must have taken offense at something. Please, could we start over? Could we meet at the Elmwood this Wednesday at noon?

Emily didn't want to meet her. She felt like ripping the letter to shreds. She looked at Gina, who lay crowing in her cardboard box, and she tried to imagine anything Gina could do—marrying, mismarrying, committing murder—that would sever her from Emily's life as Leon had severed himself from his parents'. There was nothing. She just wouldn't allow it. Gina was the whole point; even what Emily felt for Leon seemed pallid by comparison. She smoothed the letter on her lap and saw Mrs. Meredith's tense, powdery face, with
the eyebrows plucked as thin as two arched wires and the lids beneath them always a little puffed, as if she were on the edge of tears.

There were certain rules, Emily had been taught. She would have to go just this once.

Mrs. Meredith came by taxi, all the way from Richmond. Evidently, she didn't drive, and had simply hired a cab for the day. The driver sat at the next table, spreading pâté on a cracker and reading
Male
magazine. Mrs. Meredith waited behind a foggy martini glass. Her back was very straight. Then Emily entered with Gina riding the way she liked to in those days-hanging over Emily's forearm, with her bottom propped against Emily's hip, frowning darkly at her own bare toes. “Oh!” Mrs. Meredith cried out, and one hand flew to her throat, knocking the martini glass into her lap.

Now that she thought back, Emily felt she really should have prepared Mrs. Meredith. It was too theatrical—bursting in with an unannounced grandchild. It was more like something Leon would have done. She seemed to have caught some of Leon's qualities. He seemed to have caught some of hers. (He seldom spoke of moving on any more.) She was reminded of those parking-lot accidents where one car's fender grazes another's. It had always puzzled her that on each fender, some of the other car's paint appeared. You'd think the paint would only be on one car, not both. It was as if they had traded colors.

She tried to tell Leon about the lunch, once it had taken place. She led into it gradually. “Your mother's been writing
me
now, you know,” she said.

But Leon said, “Emily, I don't want to hear about it and I don't want you to have anything to do with it. Is that clear?”

“All right, Leon,” Emily said.

And, oddly enough, even Mrs. Meredith seemed content to let things be. It seemed she only wanted the connection; just who made the connection didn't matter
so much. She liked to hear from Emily what Leon was up to. Did he help to care for Gina? “He walks her at night, and he baby-sits while I'm working in the shop,” Emily told her, “but he can't yet bring himself to change a diaper.”