Morgan's Passing (22 page)

E
ven 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 new 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.

The cottage had four bedrooms, but only three were occupied. His mother slept in the second and Kate, their last remaining child, in the third. It used to be that the place was overflowing. The girls would share beds and couches; Brindle roomed with Louisa; various daughters' boyfriends lined up in sleeping bags out on the porch. Morgan had complained of the confusion at the time, but now he missed it. He wondered what point there was in coming any more. Kate was hardly present—she was eighteen years old now, busy with her own affairs, forever off visiting friends in the ugly new condominium south of town. As for Louisa, the trip
seemed to shake her memory loose; she was even more dislocated than usual. Only Bonny appeared to enjoy herself. She padded along the shoreline with a bucket, hunting shells. The bridge of her nose developed a permanent pink, peeling patch. Sometimes she sat at the edge of the breakers and dabbled like a child, with her legs in a V—a rash of red on top, pale underneath. Then Morgan would pace the sand just behind her with his thumbs hooked in the waistband of his trunks, braving the sun and the sticky spray, for he was never comfortable when a member of his family was in the water. He considered swimming (like sailing, like skiing) to be unnatural, a rich person's contrivance to fill up empty hours. Although he could swim himself (a taut, silent breast stroke, with his mouth tightly closed, not wetting so much as the tip of his beard), he would never swim just for pleasure. And he would surely never swim in the ocean. His distrust of the ocean was logical and intelligent, he felt. He kept sensibly away from the edge, wearing stout shoes and woolen socks at all times. He only listened to the breakers, and plummeted into a deep, slow trance where once again he lay with Laura Lee Keller on a blanket beneath the stars.

It was too hot for coffee, but he'd get a headache if he tried to do without it. He made instant, using water straight from the tap. Beneath the taste of Maxwell House and sugar he caught the thick, dark taste of beach water, but he drank it anyway, from a jelly-glass painted with clowns. Then he rinsed the glass. Then he took Bonny's purse from the kitchen table and put it in the freezing compartment of the refrigerator. (Another folly of rich people was their belief that in resort towns, crime does not exist. Morgan knew better. He sensed danger all around, and would have felt more secure in the heart of Baltimore.)

He went back to the bedroom and found Bonny sitting against her pillow. “What are you up so early for?” she asked him. “And why was the radio on?”

“I wanted to hear the news,” he said.

It wasn't true; he never felt the news had anything to do with him. What he'd wanted was to drown out the sound of the ocean. This was Tuesday. They'd been here three days. There were eleven days remaining. He sighed and sat on the edge of the bed to pull his socks on. “I'll bring breakfast from the bakery,” he told Bonny. “Anything you want while I'm in town?”

“The bakery's not open yet.”

“I'll go and wait. I'll buy a paper. It's too quiet here.”

“Well, bring some of those bow-tie things with cherries, then …” She yawned and ruffled her hair. A pillow mark ran down her left cheek. “Lucky you,” she said. “You fell asleep right away, last night.”

“I had a terrible sleep.”

“You fell asleep instantly.”

“But the whole night long I dreamed,” Morgan said, “and woke, and checked the clock. I can't remember now what I dreamed. A man in a tailcoat stepped out of the wardrobe. I think this house is haunted, Bonny.”

“You say that every year,” Bonny told him.

“Well, it's haunted every year.” He pulled a striped T-shirt over his head. When he emerged, he said, “All these wakeful nights, peculiar thoughts … the most I hope for, from a vacation, is a chance to rest up once it's over.”

“Today's the day my brother comes,” Bonny said, climbing out of bed.

Morgan zipped his hiking shorts, which were new and full of pockets and flaps that he hadn't yet explored. Attached to one pocket was a metal clasp. It was probably meant for a compass. “I don't suppose you brought along a compass,” he told Bonny.

“Compass?”

He glanced at her. She was standing before the wardrobe in a short, plain nightgown that he happened to be fond of. He was even fond of the grapy veins in her calves, and her rumpled knees. He considered slipping up to kiss the pulse in her throat, but then he felt laden
by the heat and the waves and the tongue-and-groove walls. “Ah, God. I have to do something about this
life
of mine,” he said.

“What about it?” she asked, sliding a blouse off a hanger.

“It's come to nothing. It's come to nothing.”

She looked over at him, and parted her lips as if about to ask a question. But then he said, “Bow-tie pastries, right? With cherries.”

He was gone before she could ask whatever it was she had planned.

2

W
ith one hand under his mother's elbow, he steered her along the boardwalk. It was nearly noon, and she wore a great black cartwheel of a hat to guard against sunburn. Her striped terry beach robe was long-sleeved and ankle-length, and it concealed not a bathing suit but an ordinary street dress, for she could no more swim than fly, she always said. Her face was pale and pursed, even in this heat, and her fingertips were cold when she touched his arm. She touched his arm to tell him to stop for a second. She wanted to look at a house that was under construction. “What an unusual shape,” she said.

“It's called an A-frame,” Morgan said.

“Why, it's practically all garret.”

Morgan summoned his thoughts together. At moments like this, when Louisa seemed fully in touch with her surroundings, he always made an effort to have a
real conversation with her. “The cost,” he said, “is considerably lower than for other houses, I believe.”

“Yes, I should think so,” she said. She patted his arm again, and they walked on. She said, “Let's see now. How long have we been here?”

“Three days, Mother.”

“Eleven more to go,” she said.

“Yes.”

She said, “Heavens.”

“Maybe our family wasn't cut out for vacations,” Morgan said. “Maybe not.”

“It must be the work ethic,” he said.

“Well, I don't know what
that
is. It's more like we vacation all year round on our own.”

“How can you say that?” Morgan asked. “What about my hardware store?”

She didn't answer.

“We're city people,” Morgan said. “We have our city patterns, things to keep us busy … It's dangerous, lolling around like this. It's never good just to loll around and think. Why, you and Father never vacationed in your lives. Did you?”

“I don't recall,” she said.

She would not remember anything about his father, ever. Sometimes Morgan wondered if her failing memory for recent events might stem from her failing memory of her husband; selective forgetfulness was an impossibility, maybe. Having chosen to forget in one area, she had to forget in all others as well. He felt a sudden urge to jolt her. He wanted to ask: am I aging in the same direction my father did? have I journeyed too far from him? am I too near? what do I have to go on, here? I'm traveling blind; I'm older now than my own father ever lived to be. Instead, he asked, “Didn't you and he go to Ocean City once?”

“I really wouldn't know,” she said primly.

“Jesus! You're so
stubborn!”
he shouted, slapping his thigh. His mother remained unmoved, but two girls
walking ahead in bikinis looked over their shoulders at him. “Do you ever think how I must feel?” he asked his mother. “Sometimes I feel I've just been
plunked
here. I have no one from the old days; I'm just a foreigner on my own. You can't count Brindle; she's so much younger, and anyway so wrapped up in that husband of hers …”

“But there's always me,” his mother said, picking her way around a toddler with a bucket.

“Yes,” he said, “but often you sort of … vacate, Mother; you're not really there at all.”

He had hurt her feelings. He was glad of it only for an instant; then he felt deeply remorseful. His mother raised her head high and looked off toward someone's A-frame cottage, where beach towels flapped on the balcony railing. “Why!” she said. “Wasn't that speedy.”

“What was, Mother dear?”

“They've finished construction on the A-frame,” she said. “It seems like no time at all.” And she jutted her chin at him with a triumphant, bitter glare.

“So it does, dear heart,” he said.

3

M
organ went out to get a pizza for their supper and returned to find that Bonny's brother had arrived. He'd brought his new wife, Priscilla, a pretty girl with short, straight blond hair caught back in a silver barrette. They had been married only a few weeks. They wore similar crisp, new-looking white slacks and pastel shirts, like honeymooners. Morgan hadn't even met
Priscilla up till now—or people seemed to assume he hadn't, for Billy introduced her and she shook Morgan's hand formally. Bonny said, “Priscilla went to Roland Park Country School with the Semple-Pearce girls, Morgan.”