Morgan's Passing (28 page)

W
hen spring came, Emily started walking. She walked all spring and summer, down alleyways, across tattered rags of parks, through stores that smelled of pickles and garlic. She went in the front doors and out the back, emerging on some unknown street full of delivery trucks, stacked wooden crates, construction workers with pneumatic drills tearing up the pavement. Her ballet slippers, nearly soundless, tripped along in time to the music in her head. She liked songs about leaving, about women who packed up and left, and men who woke to find their beds unexpectedly empty.
If you miss the train I'm on, you will know that I am gone …
She slipped between two children sharing popcorn from a bag.
One of these mornings, it won't be long, you'll call my name and I'll be gone
 … She brushed against an old lady with a shopping bag full of bottles, did not apologize, kept going.
I know you, rider, going to miss me when I'm
 … Gone, gone, gone: her slippers thumped it out. She had a spiky step to begin with, but every day, all over again, she softened; she would slow down bit by bit, and wilt, and grow calm. She would think of how Leon's jacket hung across that broad, subtle curve between his shoulder blades. How complete his words sounded—more certain than other people's, spoken in an even voice that carried some special weight. How he always kept his mouth closed, not tightly clamped but relaxed and gentle, giving her, for some reason, an impression of secrets working within him.

She sighed and turned home, after all.

Often, on these walks, she was followed by Morgan Gower—a wide leather hat and a tumult of beard, loping along behind her. If she paused till he caught up, he'd make a nuisance of himself. He had entered some new stage, developed a new fixation. It was harmless, really, but annoying. He might declare himself to her anywhere—fling out his arms in the middle of the Broadway Fish Market, beam down at her, full of joy. “Last night I dreamed you went to bed with me.” She would click her tongue and walk away. She would march on out and down the block, cut through an alley past a grinding garbage truck, and he would follow, but he kept his distance. His hat rounded corners like a flying saucer, level and spinning, the rest of him sauntering beneath. Glancing back, she had to laugh. Then she turned away again, but he'd already noticed; she heard him laugh too. Didn't he realize she had problems on her mind? She was overhung by thoughts of Leon, like someone traveling under a cloud. First marching, then drifting, she paced out the knots and snarls of life with Leon. Love was not a comedy. But here came Morgan, laughing. She gave in and stopped once more and waited. He arrived beside her and pointed at the neon sign that swung above their heads. “Look!
LaTrella's Rooms. Weekly! Daily!
Let's just nip upstairs.”

“Really, Morgan.”

And even in front of Leon—what did Morgan imagine he was doing? In front of glowering, dark Leon, he said, “Emily, fetch your toothbrush. We're eloping.” When there was music, anywhere—a car radio passing on the street—he would seize her by the waist and dance. He danced continually, nowadays. It seemed his feet could not keep quiet. She had never known him to act so silly.

Fortunately, Leon didn't take him seriously.

“You'd be getting more than you bargained for,” he said to Morgan.

Still, she said, “Morgan, I wish you wouldn't joke like that in front of Leon. What must he think?”

“What should he think? I'm stealing you away,” Morgan said, and he circled the kitchen, where Emily happened to be washing dishes, and threw open all the cupboards. “Which things are you bringing with you? These plates? This bowl? This two-quart vinyl orange-juice pitcher?”

She rested her soapy hands on the sink and watched him. “Morgan,” she said. “Don't you ever get self-conscious?”

“Well,” he said.

He closed a cupboard door. He stroked his beard.

“That's a very interesting question,” he said. “I'm glad you asked me that. The fact is … ah, yes, I do.” She blinked. “You do?”

“The fact is,” he said, “with you: well, yes, I do.”

He stood before her, smiling. There was something clumsy about him that made her see, suddenly, what he must have been like as a boy—one of those bumbling boys who can't think what to talk about with girls; or who talk too much, perhaps, out of nervousness—compulsively relating the entire plots of movies or explaining how the internal-combustion engine works. It was a shock; she had never pictured him that way. And anyhow, she was probably wrong, for an instant later he was back to the Morgan she had always known: a gray-streaked, twinkling clown of a man, swinging into a soft-shoe dance across her kitchen floor.

At least he could make her laugh.

2

S
he walked through summer and into fall. She did other things too, of course—gave puppet shows, sewed costumes, cooked, helped Gina with her homework. But at night, when she closed her eyes, she saw a maze of streets and traffic, the way compulsive chess-players see chessboards in their dreams. She was revisited by the smallest details of her walks—by the clank of a foot on a manhole cover, the spark of mica in concrete, and the Bicentennial fire hydrants sticking out their stunted arms like so many defective babies. She opened her eyes, sat up, rearranged her pillow. “What's the trouble?” Leon would ask.

There were any number of answers she could give, all true. She said, sometimes, that she thought their marriage had something badly wrong with it, something out of step, she couldn't say just what. Maybe so, said Leon, but what did she want him to do about it? He did not believe, he said, that there was anything in the world that would make her really happy. Unless, perhaps, she could bring the whole solar system into line exactly her way, not a planet disobeying. What was it that she expected of him? he would ask. She was silent.

Or sometimes she said that she worried about Gina. It didn't seem right for a nine-year-old to act so serious, she said. It broke her heart to see her so unswervingly alert to their moods, watching from a distance, smoothing over quarrels. But Leon said Gina was growing up, that was all. Naturally, he said. Let her be, he said.

Also, Emily said, their puppet shows never went well
any more. Running through every play was some kind of dislocation—characters stepping on each other's speeches, unsynchronized, ragged, or missing cues and gawking stupidly. Fairytales fell into fragments, every line a splinter. When Cinderella danced with the Prince, their cloth bodies clung together, but the hands inside them shrank away. Emily believed that the audience could guess this. She was certain of it. Leon said that was ridiculous. They were making more money than they ever had before; they had to turn down invitations. Things were going wonderfully, Leon said.

In her sleep, she dreamed she walked a revolving pavement like a merry-go-round, and she was still tired when she woke.

Often, when she had some work that could be done by hand, she'd spend her mornings down in Crafts Unlimited. She'd perch on a stool behind the counter and listen to Mrs. Apple while she sewed. Mrs. Apple knew hundreds of craftsmen, all their irregular, colorful lives, and she could talk on and on about them in her cheery way, stringing together people Emily had never heard of. Emily relaxed, expanded, watched well-dressed grandmothers buying her puppets. Once Mrs. Apple's son Victor came to visit. He was living in D.C. now and had driven over unannounced. He'd gained a good deal of weight and shaved off his mustache. His wife, a pretty woman with flossy blond hair, carried their small son in her arms. “Well, well, well,” Victor said to Emily, and he hooked his thumbs into the tiny pockets of his vest. “I see you're still making puppets.”

She felt she had to defend herself. “Yes,” she said, “but they're much different now. They're a whole different process.”

Getting off her stool, though, going to a table to show him a king with a gnarled face, she was conscious of how dreary she must seem to him—still in the same building, the same occupation, wearing the same kind of clothes. Her braids, she felt suddenly, might as well have solidified on her head. She wished she had not let
Morgan Gower persuade her to go back to ballet slippers. She wished she had Gina here—all the change that anyone could ask for. Victor bounced slightly on the balls of his feet, examining the king. Melissa, Emily thought suddenly. Melissa Tibbett—that was the name of the birthday child at their very first show, when Victor had been the doll-voiced father wondering what to bring back from his travels. Melissa must be in her teens by now—sixteen years old, at least; long past puppets. Emily set the king back on the table and smoothed his velvet robe.

“How about Leon?” Victor asked. “Is he doing any acting?”

“Oh, well, not so very much. No, not so much at the moment,” she said.

He nodded. She hated the understanding way he looked into her eyes.

That afternoon she pulled a cardboard box from the closet and unpacked her marionettes. She'd been experimenting with marionettes for several years. She liked the challenge: they were harder to work. She had figured out her own arrangement of strings, suspended from a single cross of Popsicle sticks. There were two strings for the hands, two more for the knees, and one each for the head and the lower back. (At fairs she'd seen double and triple crosses, like biplanes, and half a dozen additional strings, but none of it seemed essential.) She took a Red Riding Hood, her most successful effort, and went into the living room. Leon was on the couch, reading the afternoon paper. Gina was writing a book report. “Look,” Emily said.

Leon glanced up. Then he said, “Oh, Emily, not those marionettes again.”

“But look: see how easy?”

She pranced Red Riding Hood across the floor, up the couch, into Gina's lap. Gina giggled. Then Red Riding Hood skipped away, swinging a small yellow basket that snapped cleverly over her arm. “What do you think?” Emily asked Leon.

“Very nice, but not for us,” Leon said. “Emily, our old puppets can do that, and more besides. They can set the basket down and pick it up again. They don't have all those strings in the way.”

“Oh, it's just like with my shadow puppets. You won't try anything new,” she said. “I'm tired of the old ones.”

“So?” he asked her. “You can't just switch the universe around, any time you're tired of it.”

She packed the marionettes in their box. She went for a walk, though she ought to be starting supper. At the corner of Crosswell and Hartley she paused for a traffic light and Morgan Gower came up beside her. He was wearing a tall black suit, a high-collared shirt, and a bowler hat so ancient it looked rusty. He bowed and tipped his hat. She laughed. A grin spread behind his beard, but he seemed to guess her mood and he didn't speak. In fact, when the light turned green he dropped back again, though she was conscious of his presence-keeping a measured distance behind, humming a little tune and watching over her.

3

I
n October, Emily's second cousin Claire called to say that her great-aunt had died in her sleep. She'd donated her remains to the cause of medical science, Claire said (just like Aunt Mercer; she would put it in just those words), but still there'd be a service at the Meetinghouse. Emily thought she ought to attend it. She hadn't seen Aunt Mercer in twelve years—not since before her marriage. They had only exchanged Christmas
cards, with polite, fond notes beneath the signatures. Going now, of course, was pointless; but even so, Emily canceled a puppet show and left Gina with Leon and took the Volkswagen south.

She was nervous about making the four-hour trip alone, but as soon as she'd merged on the interstate she felt wonderful. It seemed that the air here was thinner and lighter. She was even pleased by all the traffic she encountered—so many people skimming along! No doubt they were out here day and night, endlessly circling the planet, and now at last she had joined them. She smiled at every driver she passed. She was fascinated by the private, cluttered worlds she glimpsed—maps and stuffed animals on window ledges; a passenger sleeping, open-mouthed; a pair of children combing out their dog.