Morgan's Passing (18 page)

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

1

T
he 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.

“The whole idea,” Leon was quoted as saying, “is improvisation. We take it moment by moment. We adapt as we go along. I'm talking about the plays, you understand—not the puppets. The puppets are my wife's doing. She makes them according to a fixed pattern.
They're
not improvised.”

This was true, in a way, and yet it wasn't. Emily did have a homemade brown-paper pattern for the puppets' outlines, but the outlines were the least of it. What was important was the faces, the dips and hills of their expressions, which tended to develop unexpected twists of their own no matter how closely she guided the fabric through the sewing machine. Yes, definitely, the puppets were improvised too. She wished she'd spoken up
when that reporter was interviewing them—said something to defend herself.

“The heads are padded,” Leon said, “and stiffened with some kind of sizing. My wife mixes the sizing. She has her own recipe, her own way of doing things. I'm allowed to help with the props sometimes, but my wife insists on making the puppets totally by herself.”

Emily folded the paper and laid it aside. She went down the hall to the back room. It was Gina's room now. The sewing machine and the muslin bags had been moved to the room Leon and Emily shared; Gina's belongings had multiplied too far to be contained in one small corner. Her unmade bed was laden with stuffed animals, books, and clothes. In the rocking chair by the window sat a Snoopy dog bigger than Gina. Grandma and Grandpa Meredith had brought it for her sixth birthday. Emily felt it was ridiculous to give a child something that size—not to mention the cost. What could they have been thinking of? “Oh, well,” Leon had told her, “that's just how they are, I guess.
You
know how they are.”

Gina was under the bed. She emerged, frowsy-haired, with a sneaker in her hand. “Aren't you ready yet?” Emily asked her. “It's time to go.”

“I was looking for my shoe.”

Emily took the sneaker from her and loosened a knot in the lace. “Now, Gina, listen,” she said. “We've got a play to give out in the country today, and we're leaving before you get back. When kindergarten's over, you walk home with the Berger girls and wait in the shop till we come. Mrs. Apple says she'll keep an eye on you.”

“Why can't I stay home and go with you?”

“Summer will be here soon enough,” Emily told her. “You'll be home all the time, come summer.”

She slipped the sneaker on Gina's foot and tied it. Gina's socks were already creased and soiled and falling down her ankles. Her blouse had egg on the front. Emily had known children like Gina when she was a
child herself. They had a kind of extravagant squalor; there was something lush about the tumbled appearance of their clothing. She had always assumed their mothers were to blame, but now she knew better. Not half an hour ago Gina had been neat as a pin; Emily had made certain of it. She plucked a dust ball from Gina's hair, which was rich and thick-stranded like Leon's. “Come along,” she told her. “You'll be late.”

She slung her purse on her shoulder and they left the apartment, clicking the latch very gently because Leon was still asleep. They walked down the stairs, where everyone's breakfast smells hung in the air—bacon, burned butter, the Conways' kippered herrings. They passed the door of the shop, which was still dark, and stepped out into the street. It was a warm, sunny morning. The city looked freshly washed, with gold-lit buildings rising through a haze in the distance, women in spring dresses sweeping their stoops, green ivy flooding through the windows of an abandoned rowhouse. Gina hung on to Emily's hand and skipped and sang:

Emily said good morning to Mrs. Ellery, who was shaking out her dust mop, and to the ancient blind man whose daughter, or granddaughter it must have been, set him on his stoop every fair day with a grayish quilt wrapped around his legs. “Nice weather,” Emily called, and the old man nodded, turning his sealed-looking eyelids toward the sun like a plant in the window. She stopped on the second corner to wait for the Berger girls. Helena Berger shooed them out the door—two little freckled redheads in plaid dresses. They ran ahead with Gina, and at the next intersection Emily had to call, “Stop! Wait!” She hurried up, out of breath,
while they lurched and teetered on the edge of the curb. She held out her hands, and the younger Berger girl took one and Gina took the other. The Berger child was all bones; Emily felt a rush of love for Gina's warm, chubby fingers, which were slightly sticky in the creases. She waded across the street, embroiled in children, and turned them loose on the other side. They scattered ahead again, skipping disjointedly.

Emily sensed a presence nearby, the shape of someone familiar, and she turned and found Morgan Gower loping along beside her. He tipped his battered green Army helmet and smiled. “Morgan,” she said. “How come you're out so early?”

“I couldn't sleep past five o'clock this morning,” he said. “There's too much excitement at the house.”

At Morgan's house there was always too much excitement. She'd never been there, but she pictured a bulging, seething box of a place—the roof straining off, the side seams splitting. “What is it this time?” she asked him.

“It's Brindle. My sister. Her sweetheart came back.”

Emily hadn't known his sister had a sweetheart. She shaded her eyes and called, “Children! Wait for me!” Then she said, “Did Kate get out of her leg cast yet?”

“Who?” he asked. “Oh, yes. Yes, that's all … but see, at seven or so last night, just at the end of supper, the doorbell rang and Bonny said, ‘Brindle, go see who that is, will you?' since Brindle was nearest the door, so Brindle went and then …”

They'd reached the intersection. Emily held out her hands and the children swarmed around her, knocking Morgan backward a pace. When she'd crossed to the other side and turned to look for him, he was picking
up his helmet from the gutter. He polished it with his sleeve, sadly, and set it on his head. It matched his splotchy camouflage jacket and his crumpled olive-drab jungle pants. He was always dressing for catastrophes that were unlikely to occur, she thought. “These are guaranteed, certified, snake-proof boots,” he said now. He stopped to hold up one green foot. “I bought them at Sunny's Surplus.”

“They're very nice,” she said. “Children! Slow down, please.”

“How come you have those other two girls?” Morgan asked. “I don't remember seeing them before.”

“I'm trading off with their mother. She's walking Gina home today so that I can do a show.”

“Well, it all seems so disorganized,” Morgan said. “I come to you people for peace and quiet and I find this disorganization. Look at Gina: she hasn't even said hello to me.”

“Oh, she will; you know she loves to see you. It's only that she's with friends.”

“I prefer it when you both come and Gina walks between you, just the one of her. Where's Leon? Why isn't he here?”

“He's sleeping. He was out late last night, trying for a part in a play.”

“It's too disorganized,” Morgan said glumly. He stopped and peered down the front of his jacket. Then he reached inside and brought up a pack of cigarettes. “So Brindle goes to the door,” he said, “and nothing more happens. There's nothing but silence. Well, we thought she might have faded off somewhere. Forgot where she was headed. Lost her way or something. You know Brindle. Or at least, you know
about
her: always in that bathrobe, moping. ‘How was your day?' you ask, and she says, ‘Day?' She acts surprised to hear there's been one. ‘Go see where she's got to,' Bonny tells me. ‘She's
your
sister; see what she's up to.' So I push away from the table and go to find her and there she is in the entrance hall being kissed by a total
stranger. It's one of those long, deep, wrap-around kisses, like in the movies. I was uncertain what to do about it. It seemed rude to interrupt, but if I turned and left they'd no doubt hear the floorboards creak, so I just stood there flossing my teeth and the two of them went on kissing. Heavy-set man with slicked-down hair. Brindle in her bathrobe. Finally I ask, ‘Was there something you wanted?' Then they pulled apart and Brindle said, ‘It's Robert Roberts, my childhood sweetheart. Don't you know him?”

“Children!” Emily called. They'd reached another intersection. She ran ahead to take their hands. Morgan followed, muttering something. “Known him all his life, of course” was what it sounded like. “Knew him when he was a
bit
of a thing, coming to play roll-a-bat with Brindle in the alley. Called her ‘Idiot. Dumbhead. Moron,' in that fond, insulting way that childhood sweethearts have …”