Morgan's Passing (44 page)

Then he took his cap and jacket from the closet and put them on, and he wrote a note to Emily:
Gone on an errand. Back soon
. He let himself out the door and crossed the yard to his truck and climbed in.

It was a forty-five-minute drive to Baltimore, and all through it he talked steadily underneath his breath. “Silly damn Bonny,” he muttered, “damn meddler; stupid, interfering meddler, thinks she's so—” He glanced in the rear-view mirror and swung out to pass a van. “Sitting there rubbing her hands together, laughing at me; thinks she got
to
me somehow. Ha, that's how much she knows, yes …”

He wondered how she'd found out what town he lived
in. He had never told her. He considered the possibility that she had put the item in every paper in the state of Maryland—every paper in the country, even. Lord, all across the continent, for anyone to see. He pictured her telephoning hundreds and thousands of editors, rushing into their offices, trailing balls of Kleenex and rough drafts on the backs of cash-register tapes—a woman with her accelerator stuck. She had always lived a headlong kind of life. Any mental image he had of her (he thought, honking at a wandering sports car) showed her breathless, with her hair in her eyes and her blouse untucked. Look how she'd thrown his clothes out, and his mother and his sister and the dog! Cursing to himself, slamming on his brakes, he forgot that she had thrown them out at different times. He imagined that she'd dumped them all at once. He seemed to remember Brindle and Louisa, deposited in front of the hardware store, waiting on little camp stools till he could collect them. Or, why camp stools, even? Lying on their backs, like overturned beetles, in an ocean of discarded costumes. He recalled that Bonny often seemed to be held together by safety pins. Safety pins connected a slip strap to her slip, a buttonhole to the thready place where a button should have been, and her watch to its black ribbon band. And the watch was almost never wound. And the gaps in her hems were repaired with Scotch tape that rustled when she walked; no, when she ran; no, when she galloped by. She had never been known to just walk.

This used to be all farmland, but now each town was linked to the others by a frayed strand of filling stations and shopping malls. Morgan sped along. The superstructure on his truckbed moaned. The padlock on its rear door clanked whenever he slowed down.

“Thinks she's so clever, thinks I care. Thinks it matters what fool thing she does to me.”

He entered the outskirts of Baltimore. They'd put up more apartment buildings. You couldn't turn your back, it seemed. At a traffic light a boy braked beside him in
a long, finned Dodge that must have been twenty years old. All the windows were closed, but the music on his radio was so loud that it sailed out anyhow—the “Steadily Depressing, Low-Down, Mind-Messing, Working at the Carwash Blues.” In spite of himself, Morgan beat time on the steering wheel.

At least there was a little sun here—a pale, weak, late-winter sun lighting white steeples and empty sidewalks. He drove north on Charles, passing a stream of small shops and then the University, deserted-looking, its buildings clean and precisely placed like something built of toy blocks. He turned into a corridor of large houses, cafés, apartment buildings, and parked on Bonny's street but some distance from her house, so she wouldn't easily see the truck from her windows. Then he got out and lit a cigarette and started waiting.

It was cold, even in the sunlight. He raised his collar around his ears. He saw the newspaper on Bonny's front walk. Ten-something in the morning and she hadn't brought it in yet; typical. A cardinal was sitting in the dogwood tree, a drop of red in a net of black branches. Morgan wondered if it could be one of those who'd hatched in that nest in the mock-orange bush a few years back. He felt some proprietary interest. All one summer he'd chased the cat away; the parent birds would alert him, fluttering and giving their anxious chirps that sounded like the clink of loose change in a pocket. But didn't cardinals migrate? His cigarette tasted like burning trash. He ground it out.

Then here came Billy's wife, Priscilla, tapping up the walk in her spiffy white coat, carrying her basket-shaped purse that was sure to have a whale carved on its lid. She disappeared into the house. (She had to step right over the paper.) She was extraneous, no one he ever gave much thought to; he dismissed her instantly. He leaned forward and watched the door open again. Out popped a boy. His grandson? Todd? If so, he'd grown. He was carrying a yellow skateboard, and when he reached the street he just walked away—here one second,
gone the next, for Morgan didn't watch after him. He was centered on that door still.

A long time went by. He leaned against the hood of the truck and listened to the engine ticking as it cooled.

The door first darkened, drawing inward, and then vanished altogether. Bonny stepped out on the stoop. Beneath her matted brown cardigan she wore something peasantish, unbecoming—a gauzy, full blouse, and a gathered skirt that made her look fat. Morgan assumed she was heading for the paper, but she ignored it as the others had and continued down the walk. Morgan slid around behind the truck. She didn't even look in his direction. She turned west, bustling along. He saw something flash in her hand—her red billfold, no doubt overstuffed as always with credit cards, outdated photos, and wrinkled little wads of money.

For a while he followed, keeping well back. He knew where she was going, of course. On a Sunday morning, with Priscilla there, and Todd, and who knew how many other people, she'd be off to the bakery for cinnamon rolls. But he followed anyway, and fixed his eyes on her. She'd let her hair grow, he noticed—a mistake. The puffy little clump at the back of her neck had turned into a sort of oval, with tattered ends.

What was going on in that head?

This was why he'd come: to find out. He'd driven here without wondering what for, and was confronted with it now so abruptly that he stopped short. All he wanted to ask was, why had she
done
it?

Was some meaning implied?

Did she imagine …?

No, surely not.

Did she imagine he really had passed away?

“Passed away” was all he was up to just now. “Died” would stick in his throat. No, he couldn't ask that.

He continued to stand there while Bonny went on racing toward the bakery.

Then he turned and went back to the house. He circled
around it. (The front door opened to the center hall, where anyone might see him enter.) He walked to the side, toward the screen porch, reached through a rip in the screen and raised the rusty hook and let himself in. The moldly smell of the wicker furniture—like mice, like cheap magazines—reminded him of summer. He tried the knob of the glass-paned door that led to the living room. It was unlocked. (He'd warned them a thousand times.) Soundlessly, he slipped in.

The room was empty. Last night's Parcheesi game lay scrambled in front of the cold gray fireplace. A cup was making a ring on the coffee table. He crossed to the hall. From the kitchen Priscilla called, “Bonny? Back so soon?”

He darted toward the stairs, keeping to carpets, where his footsteps would be softest. He mounted the stairs so swiftly that he scared himself—the blurred speed of his climb was too hushed, too spooky. In the upstairs hall his heel clicked once on the floorboards by accident. He ducked into the bedroom and clapped a palm to his pounding chest.

No one came.

Her bed was unmade and her nightgown was a spill of soiled ivory nylon across the rug. All the bureau drawers were open. So was the closet. He tiptoed to the closet. How unlike itself it seemed: so much space. You couldn't say it was bare, exactly (those clothes of hers she never would give up, skirts with the hemlines altered a dozen different times, Ship 'n Shore blouses from the fifties with their dinky Peter Pan collars), but certainly it was emptier than it used to be. The shelf where he'd kept his hats now held a typewriter case, a hairdryer, and a shoebox. He opened the shoebox and found a pair of shoes, the chunky kind so out of date they were coming back into fashion.

He opened the drawer in her nightstand and found a tube of hand cream and a book of Emily Dickinson's poems.

He opened the drawer in
his
nightstand (once upon a
time) and found a coupon for instant coffee, a light-up ballpoint pen, and a tiny leather notebook with
Night Thoughts
written in gilt across the cover. Aha! But the only night thoughts she'd had were:

Something clamped his wrist—a claw. He dropped the book. “Sir,” said Louisa.

“Mother?”

“I've forgotten the number for the police.”

“Mother,” he said, “I've only come to … pick up a few belongings.”

“Is it 222-3333? Or 333-2222.”

She still had hold of his wrist. He couldn't believe how strong she was. When he tried to squirm away, she tightened her fingers. He could have struggled harder, but he was afraid of hurting her. There was something brittle and crackling about the feel of her. He said, “Mother dear, please let go.”

“Don't call
me
Mother, you scruffy-looking, hairy person.”

“Oh,” he said. “You really don't know me.”

“Would I be likely to?” she asked him.

She wore her Sunday black, although she never attended church—a draped and fluted black dress with a cameo at the throat. On her feet were blue terrycloth scuffs from which her curved, opaque toenails emerged—more claws. She encaged his wrist in a ring of bone.

“I said to the lady downstairs,” she said, “ ‘There's burglars on the second floor.' She said, ‘It's only those squirrels again.' I told her, ‘This time it's burglars.' ”

“Look. Ask Brindle if you don't believe me,” said Morgan.

“Brindle?” She considered. “Brindle,” she said.

“Your daughter. My sister.”

“She told me it was squirrels,” Louisa said. “At night she asks, ‘What's that skittering? What's that scuttling? Is it burglars?' I say, ‘It's squirrels.' Now I say, ‘Hear that burglar on the second floor?' She says, ‘It's only squirrels, Mother. Didn't you always tell me that? They're hiding their acorns in the rafters in the attic.' ”

“Oh? You have rodents?” Morgan asked.

“No, squirrels. Or
something
up there, snickering around …”

“You want to be careful,” Morgan told her. “It could very well be bats. The last thing you need is a rabid bat. What you ought to do, you see, simply take a piece of screening—”

His mother said, “Morgan?”

“Yes.”

“Is that you?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Oh, hello, dear,” she said serenely. She let go of his wrist, and kissed him.

“It's good to see you, Mother,” he said.

Then Bonny said, from the doorway, “Get out.”

“Why, Bonny!” said Morgan.

“Out.”

She was carrying her sack from the bakery, and gave off the mingled smells of cinnamon and fresh air. Her eyes had darkened alarmingly. Yes, she meant business, all right. He knew the signs. He edged away from his mother. (But there was only one door, and Bonny blocked it.)

“I was just leaving, Bonny,” he said. “I only came to ask you something.”

“I won't answer,” she said. “Now go.”

“Bonny—”

“Go, Morgan.”

“Bonny, why'd you put that piece in the paper?”

“What piece?”

“That … item. What you call … obituary.”

“Oh,” she said. There was a sudden little twist to her mouth that he remembered well—a wry look, something
between amusement and regret. “Oh,
that,”
she said.

“What made you do it?”

She thought it over.

His mother said, “I'm certain it's not bats, because I hear their little feet.”

“To tell the truth,” Bonny said, “I'd forgotten all about it. Oh, dear. I really should have canceled it; I meant to all along; it was only one of those impulses that just hit sometimes—”

“I can't figure out how you knew where I lived,” Morgan said.

“I called Leon in Richmond and asked,” she said. “I guessed you'd tell Leon at least, because of Gina.”

“But what was the point, Bonny? An
obituary
, for God's sake.”

“Or do bats have feet too?” said his mother.

“It was meant to be an announcement,” Bonny said.

“What kind of announcement?”

She colored slightly. She touched the dent at the base of her throat. “Well, I'm seeing someone else now,” she said. “Another man.”

“Ah,” he said.

“A history professor.”

“That explains printing my obituary?”

“Yes.”

Well, yes.

He took pity on her then—her pink cheeks, and the clumsy, prideful, downward look she wore. “All right,” he said. “That's all I had to ask. I'll be going now.”

She drew back to let him pass. Already she'd collected herself—lifted and straightened. He stepped into the hall. Then he said, “But, ah, God, Bonny, you don't know how it felt! Really, such an … embarrassment, an item like that in a public place, all on account of some whim you get, some halfcocked notion!”

The twist in her mouth returned, and deepened. No doubt she found this hilarious.

“It's probably not even legal,” he said.

He started coughing. He searched his pockets for his handkerchief.

“Do you want a Kleenex?” she asked. “What's the matter with you, Morgan? You don't look well.”

“I could probably have you arrested,” he told her. He found his handkerchief and pressed it to his mouth.

“Let's not talk about what we could arrest each other for,” Bonny said.