Morgan's Passing (29 page)

She turned off the interstate and traveled smaller and smaller roads, winding through rich farm country and then poor country, passing unpainted shacks bristling with TV antennas, their yards full of trucks on blocks and the hulls of cars, then speeding through coppery woodlands laced with underbrush and discarded furniture. She reached Taney in the early afternoon. The town was still so small that several of the men hunkering before the Shell station were familiar to her—not even any older, it seemed; just painted there, dreamily holding their hand-rolled cigarettes. (Their names swam back to her: Shufords and Grindstaffs and Haithcocks. She'd had them stored in her memory all these years without knowing it.) Autumn leaves scuttled down Main Street. She turned up Erin Street and parked in front of the squat little house that she and her mother had shared with Aunt Mercer.

The yard was shadowed by great old trees. No real grass grew there—just patchy bits of plantain in the caked orange dirt, weeds trailing out of a concrete urn, and a leaf-littered boxwood hedge giving off its dusky, pungent smell. Where were Aunt Mercer's flowerbeds? She would generally have something blooming, even
this late in the year. Emily climbed the front-porch steps and paused, uncertain whether to knock or to walk on in. Then the door swung open and Claire said, “Emily, honey!”

She hadn't changed. She was plump and kind-faced, with little gray curls in a pom-pom over her forehead and another pom-pom at the back of her neck. She wore a stiff, wide, navy-blue dress that barely bent to accommodate her, and heavy black shoes with open toes. “Honey, don't just stand there. Where's your little family?”

“I left them home,” Emily said.

“Left them! Came all this way by yourself? Oh, and we were counting on seeing your sweet daughter …”

Emily couldn't imagine Gina in this house. It wouldn't work; the two wouldn't meet in her mind. She followed Claire through the hall, with its smell of old newspapers, and into the parlor. The furniture was dark and ungainly. It so completely filled the room that Emily almost failed to notice the two people sitting on the puffy brown sofa—Claire's husband, Claude, and Aunt Junie, Claire's mother, the mountainous old woman who also lived here. Neither one was a blood relation, but Emily bent to kiss their cheeks. She'd last seen them when she came home after her mother's death, and they'd been sitting on this very sofa. They might have remained here ever since—abandoned, sagging, like large cloth dolls. When Claude reached up to pat her shoulder, the rest of him stayed sunk in the cushions; his arm seemed disproportionately long and distant from his body. Aunt Junie said, “Oh, Emily, look at you, so grown up …”

Emily sat on the sofa between them. Claire settled in a rocker. “Did you eat?” she asked Emily. “You want to wash up? Have a Coke? Some buttermilk?”

“I'm fine,” Emily said. She felt
sinfully
fine, larger and stronger and less needy than all three of them put together. She folded her hands across her purse. There was a silence. “It's good to be back,” she said.

“Wouldn't Aunt Mercer be pleased?” asked Claire.

There was a little bustle of motion; they'd found their subject. “Oh, wouldn't she just love to see you sitting here,” Aunt Junie said.

“I wish she could have known,” said Claire. “I wish you could have come before she passed.”

“But it was painless,” Claude said.

“Oh, yes. It's the way she'd have wanted to go.”

“If she had to go, well, that's the way.”

Claire said, “All those troubles with her joints, Emily; you never saw. Arthritis swolled her up so, she got extra knobs and knuckles. Times she had a job just fixing her meals, but you know how she was: she wouldn't give in. Times she couldn't button her buttons or dial on the telephone, and Mama with that elbow of hers … I would say, ‘Aunt Mercer, let me come over and stay a while,' but she said, ‘No,' said, ‘I can do it.' She just had to do it her way. She always liked to feed that cat of hers herself, said it wouldn't eat from anyone else, which was only what she liked to believe; and she was bound and determined to write her own letters. At Christmas—remember, Emily? How she always wrote you, longhand? And sent a little something for the baby. And Easter, why, that was her day to have us all over, and do every bit herself. Polished the silver, set the table … but she had to see to it some time ahead, in case the arthritis, you know … I stopped by on Good Friday and there was the cloth on the table and the very best china laid out. I said, ‘Aunt Mercer, what's all this in aid of?' ‘I just want to be sure it's ready,' she said, ‘for your mama can't manage a thing with that elbow and I do like to get organized.' See, she would never even mention her arthritis. Doctor had to tell us what was what; said, ‘She is in more pain than she lets on.' She hated to put us out, never cared to lean on others. In some ways, it was best that she was taken when she was.”

“Oh, it was all for the best,” Aunt Junie said.

Claude said, “It was a mercy.”

“I should have come before,” Emily said. “I never knew. She never mentioned it in her letters.”

“Yes, well, that was how she was.”

“But she'd be proud that you came now,” Aunt Junie said.

“And you'll want to go through her things, surely—so many of her nice things that I know she would want you to keep,” Claire said.

“I don't have room in the car,” said Emily. But suddenly she felt she would like this whole house—the wallpaper patterned with wasp-waisted baskets of flowers, the carpet always rubbed the wrong way, the china high-heeled slipper filled with chalky china roses. She imagined moving in. She pictured resuming her life where she'd left off, drinking her morning cocoa from the celery-green glass mug she'd found in a cereal box when she was eight. And when Claire said, “But her jade bar pin, Emily,
that
wouldn't need any space,” she instantly pictured the bar pin, streaked with a kind of wood grain and twined at one end with blackened gold leaves. She was amazed at how much was still lodged in her mind. Like the Shufords, the Grindstaffs, and the Haithcocks, Aunt Mercer's house lived on in Emily, every warped shingle and small-paned window, whether she took it out to examine it or not. She would let the bar pin go to Aunt Junie, who wore such things, but in a sense she would continue owning it forever, and she might catch an accidental glimpse of it, barely noticed, some moment while waking or falling asleep fifty years from now.

“I don't have room even for that,” she said.

Then she spread her hands and looked down at them—the parched white backs of them, the gold wedding ring as thin as wire.

At four o'clock they got to their feet and prepared to walk over to the Meetinghouse. Everyone seemed to have a great many coats and scarves, although it was a warm day. They helped each other, like handicapped people. Claire smoothed Claude's collar for him and
straightened his lapels. “Don't you have a wrap, dear?”

Aunt Junie asked Emily. “Your … what is that … skirt and top; it's so thin. Won't you borrow a sweater? You don't want to take a chill.” But Emily shook her head.

Walking up Erin Street, they did meet a few young people, wearing boot-cut jeans and those velvet blazers that were popular in Baltimore too. This town was not so isolated as Emily had imagined. But the Meetinghouse—the only Friends Meeting in Taney County-was as small and poor as ever, a gray frame cubicle huddled in the back yard of the Savior Baptist Church; and everyone approaching it was old. They mumbled and clung to each other's arms, climbing the front steps. Emily hoped to see the friends she'd gone to First Day School with—never more than three or four of them in the best of times—but they must have moved away. There was no one under fifty. She took her seat on a straight-backed bench, between Aunt Junie and Claude. She looked around the little room and counted fourteen people. The fifteenth entered and closed the door behind him. A hush fell like the hush on a boat when the engine is cut off and the sails are raised.

In this quiet Emily had grown up—not a total silence but a ticking, breathing quiet, with the occasional sound of cloth rubbing cloth, little stirrings, throats cleared, people rustling coughdrop packets or fumbling through their purses. She expected nothing from it. (She had never been religious.) She wondered, for the hundredth time, what that dusty red glass was on the ledge above the east window. It was nearly overflowing with something that looked like wax. Maybe it was a candle. She always came to that conclusion. (But first she thought of something brewing—a culture, yogurt, dough, something concocting itself out of nothing.) She tried to name all the states in the Union. There were four beginning with A, two with C … but the M's were hard; there were so many: Montana, Missouri, Mississippi …

An old man with cottony hair rose and stood leaning on his cane. “Mercer Dulaney,” he said, “once walked two and one-half miles in rheumatism weather to feed my dogs while I was off visiting my sister in Fairfax County. I reckon now I'll take that cat of hers and tend it, if it don't get on too bad with my dogs.”

He sat down, groped for a handkerchief, and wiped his lips. “Ah, ah,” he said. It made her think of Morgan Gower; he sometimes said that. She was surprised to remember her other life—its speed, its modernness, the great rush of noisy people she knew. She thought of Morgan hurtling down the street behind her, her daughter (daughter!) hailing a city bus; Leon tossing coins on the bureau before he undressed. She remembered the first time she ever saw Leon. He had walked in the door of the library reading room, wearing that corduroy jacket of his. He had stood there looking around him, hunting someone, and had not found whoever it was and turned to go; but in turning, he caught sight of Emily and paused and looked at her again, and then frowned and went on out. She had not actually been introduced to him for another week. But now it seemed to her that at his entrance—swinging through the library door, carrying a single book in his hand (his fingers fine-textured and brown, his shirtcuffs so perfectly white)—her life had suddenly been set in motion. Everything had started up, as if complicated wheels and gears had finally connected, and had raced along in a blur from then on. It was only now, in this slowed-down room, that she had a chance to examine what had happened. Why! Her mother had died! Her mother, and she'd never truly mourned her. She thought of the last time they'd spoken, on the long-distance phone in the dormitory lobby. (“It's raining here,” her mother had said. “But I don't want to waste our three minutes on the weather. Did you get that skirt I mailed you? But I don't want to waste this time on clothes, my goodness …”) She thought about her dormitory room with its two narrow iron bedsteads and the stuffed white unicorn
on her pillow. She had once collected unicorns; she'd loved them. What had happened to her unicorn collection? Her roommate must have got it, or Goodwill had come, or it had simply been discarded. And think what else was gone: her favorite books she'd brought with her to college, her diary, her locket with her only picture of her father in it—a young man, laughing. She ached for all of them. She felt they had just this minute been ripped away from her. She thought of Aunt Mercer with her long-chinned, sharp, witty face, her pale, etched mouth always fighting back a smile. It was such a loss; she was so lost without Aunt Mercer.

“When she and I were girls,” Aunt Junie said, dragging herself to her feet, plunking her purse in Emily's lap, “we used to walk to school together. We were the only two girls from the Meeting and we kept to ourselves. Little did I guess I would be marrying her brother, in those days! I thought he was just a pest. We had these plans for leaving here, getting clean away. We were going to join the gypsies. In those days there were gypsies everywhere. Mercer sent off for a book on how to read the cards, but we couldn't make head nor tail of it. Oh, but I still have the cards someplace, and the string puppets from when we planned to put on shows in a painted wagon, and the elocution book from when we wanted to take up acting … and of course we had thoughts of becoming reporters. Lady news reporters. But it never came to anything. What if we'd known then how it would turn out? What if someone had told us what we'd
really
do—grow old in Taney, Virginia, and die?”

She sat down then, and retrieved her purse from Emily, and closed her eyes and went back to waiting.

4

T
hat evening they had supper at Claire's—casseroles brought over by other members of the Meeting, fruit pies with people's last names adhesive-taped to the tins. No one ate much. Claude chewed a toothpick and watched a small TV on the kitchen counter. He was an educated man, a dentist, but there was something raw-boned and countrified about him, Emily thought, when he gave his startled barks of laughter at a re-run of “The Brady Bunch.” Claire toyed with a piece of pie. Aunt Junie studied her plate and chewed the inside of her lip. Later, when the dishes were done, they moved to the larger TV in the living room. At nine o'clock Aunt Junie said she was tired, and Emily helped her next door to Aunt Mercer's, where both of them planned to sleep.