Morgan's Passing (5 page)

“Your father would have sold this house long ago,” Morgan often told her. “Capital gains or no capital gains, he'd say you should get a new one.”

But Bonny would say, “Why? What for?” She would ask, “What's wrong with this one? Everything's been kept up. I just had the roofers in. The painters came last May.”

“Yes, but—”

“What is it that bothers you? Can you name one thing that's in disrepair? Name it and I'll fix it. Every inch is in perfect shape, and the Davey tree men just fertilized the trees.”

Yes, but.

He went out front for the paper. Under his bare feet the spikes of frosty grass crunched and stabbed. Everything glittered. A single rubber flip-flop skated on the ice in the birdbath. He dashed back in, hissing, and slammed the door behind him. Upstairs an alarm clock burred, as if set off by the crash. They would be swarming everywhere soon. Morgan removed the news section and the comics section, laid them on a kitchen chair, and sat on them. Then he lit his cigarette and opened to the classified ads.

LOST
.
White wedding dress size 10. No questions asked
.

He grinned around his cigarette.

Now here came Bonny, slumping in, still buttoning her housecoat, trying to keep her slippers on her feet. Her hair was uncombed and there was a crease down one side of her face. “Did it freeze?” she asked him. “Is there frost on the ground? I meant to cover the boxwoods.” She lifted a curtain to peer out the window. “Oh, Lord, it froze.”

“Mm?”

She opened a cupboard door and clattered something. A blackened silver ashtray arrived inside the partition of Morgan's newspaper. He tapped his cigarette on it. “Listen to this,” he told her. “
FOUND
.
Article of jewelry, in Druid Hill Park. Caller must identify
. I would call and say it was a diamond ring.”

“How come?” Bonny asked. She took a carton of eggs from the refrigerator.

“Well, chances are no one wears real pearls to the zoo, or platinum bracelets, but plenty of people wear engagement rings, right? And besides, you can be so general about a ring. Yes, I would say a ring. Absolutely.”

“Maybe so,” said Bonny, cracking an egg on a skillet.

“LOST
.
Upper denture. Great sentimental value,”
Morgan read out. Bonny snorted. He said, “I made it up about the sentimental value.”

“I never would have guessed,” Bonny told him.

He could hear bare feet pounding upstairs, water running, hairdryers humming. The smell of percolating coffee filled the kitchen, along with the crisp, sharp smoke from his Camel. Oh, he was hitting his stride, all right. He had managed it, broken into another day. He spread his paper wider. “I love the classifieds,” he said. “They're so full of private lives.”

“Are you going to get those shoes fixed this morning?”

“Hmm? Listen to this:
M.G
.
All is not forgiven and never will be.”

Bonny set a cup of coffee in front of him.

“What if that's me?” Morgan asked.

“What if what's you?”

“M.G. Morgan Gower.”

“Did you do something unforgivable?”

“You can't help wondering,” Morgan said, “seeing a thing like that. You can't help stopping to think.”

“Oh, Morgan,” Bonny said. “Why do you always take the papers so personally?”

“Because I'm reading the personals,” he told her. He turned the page. “
WANTED
,” he read.
“Geotechnical lab chief.”

(For the past nineteen years he had supposedly been looking for a better job. Not that he expected to find it.)

“Here's one.
Experienced go-go girls.”

“Ha.”

He was employed by Bonny's family, managing one of their hardware stores. He had always been a tinkering, puttering, hardware sort of a man. Back in graduate school, his advisor had once complained because Morgan had spent a whole conference period squatting in the corner, talking over his shoulder while he worked on a leaky radiator pipe.

WANTED
.
Barmaid, dog groomer, forklift operator
.

What he liked were those ads with character.
(Driver to chauffeur elderly gentleman, some knowledge of Homer desirable.)
Occasionally he would even answer one. He would even take a job for a couple of days, vanishing from the hardware store and leaving his clerk in charge. Then Bonny's Uncle Ollie would find out and come storming to Bonny, and Bonny would sigh and laugh and ask Morgan what he thought he was doing. He would say this for Bonny: she didn't get too wrought up about things. She just sloped along with him, more or less. He reached out for her, now, as she passed with a pitcher of orange juice. He crooked an arm around
her hips, or tried to; she had her mind on something else. “Where's Brindle? Where's your mother?” she asked him. “I thought I heard your mother hours ago.”

He laid the classified ads aside and tugged another section from beneath him: the news. But there was nothing worth reading. Plane crashes, train crashes, tenement fires … He flipped to the obituaries.
“Mrs. Grimm. Opera Enthusiast,”
he read aloud.
“Tilly Abbott, Thimble Collector
. Ah, Lord.”

His daughters had begun to seep downstairs. They were quarreling in the hall and dropping books, and their transistor radios seemed to be playing several different songs at once. A deep, rocky drumbeat thudded beneath electric guitars.

“Peter Jacobs, at 44,”
Morgan read. “Forty-four! What kind of age is that to die?”

“Girls!” Bonny called. “Your eggs are getting cold.”

“I hate it when they won't say what did a man in,” Morgan told her. “Even ‘a lengthy illness'—I mean, a lengthy illness would be better than nothing. But all they have here is
‘passed on unexpectedly
.' ” He hunched forward to let someone sidle behind him. “Forty-four years old! Of course it was unexpected. You think it was a heart attack? Or what?”

“Morgan, I wish you wouldn't put such stock in obituaries,” Bonny said.

She had to raise her voice; the girls had taken over the kitchen by now. All of them were talking at once about history quizzes, boys and more boys, motorcycles, basketball games, who had borrowed whose record album and never given it back. A singer was rumored to be dead. (Someone said she would die herself if that were true.) Amy was doing something to the toaster. The twins were mixing their health-food drink in the blender. A French book flew out of nowhere and hit Liz in the small of the back. “I can't go on living here any more,” Liz said. “I don't get a moment's peace. Everybody picks on me. I'm leaving.” But all she did was pour herself a cup of coffee and sit down
next to Morgan. “For heaven's sake,” she said to Bonny, “what's that he got on his head?”

“Feel free to address me directly,” Morgan told her. “I have the answer, as it happens. Don't be shy.”

“Does he have to wear those hats of his? Even in the house he wears them. Does he have to look so peculiar?”

This was his thirteen-year-old. Once he might have been offended, but he was used to it by now. Along about age eleven or twelve, it seemed they totally changed. He had loved them when they were little. They had started out so small and plain, chubby and curly and even-tempered, toddling devotedly after Morgan, and then all at once they went on crash diets, grew thin and irritable, and shot up taller than their mother. They ironed their hair till it hung like veils. They traded their dresses for faded jeans and skimpy little T-shirts. And their taste in boyfriends was atrocious. Just atrocious. He couldn't believe some of the creatures they brought home with them. On top of all that, they stopped thinking Morgan was so wonderful. They claimed he was an embarrassment. Couldn't he shave his beard off? Cut his hair? Act his age? Dress like other fathers? Why did he smoke those unfiltered cigarettes and pluck those tobacco shreds from his tongue? Did he realize that he hummed incessantly underneath his breath, even at the dinner table, even now while they were asking him these questions?

He tried to stop humming. He briefly switched to a pipe, but the mouthpiece cracked in two when he bit it. And once he got a shorter haircut than usual and trimmed his beard so it was square and hugged the shape of his jaw. It looked artificial, they told him. It looked like a
wooden
beard, they said.

He felt he was riding something choppy and violent, fighting to keep his balance, smiling beatifically and trying not to blink.

“See that? He's barefoot,” Liz said.

“Hush and pour that coffee back,” Bonny told her. “You know you're not allowed to drink coffee yet.”

The youngest, Kate, came in with a stack of schoolbooks. She was not quite eleven and still had Bonny's full-cheeked, cheery face. As she passed behind Morgan's chair, she plucked his hat off, kissed the back of his head, and replaced the hat.

“Sugar-pie,” Morgan said.

Maybe they ought to have another baby.

With everyone settled around this table, you couldn't even bend your elbows. Morgan decided to retreat. He rose and ducked out of the room backward, like someone leaving the presence of royalty, so they wouldn't see the comics section he was hiding behind him. He padded into the living room. One of the radios was playing “Plastic Fantastic Lover” and he paused to do a little dance, barefoot on the rug. His mother watched him sternly from the couch. She was a small, hunched old lady with hair that was still jet black; it was held flat with tortoise-shell combs from which it crinkled and bucked like something powerful. She sat with her splotched, veined hands folded in her lap; she wore a drapy dress that seemed several sizes too large for her. “Why aren't you at breakfast?” Morgan asked.

“Oh, I'll just wait till all this has died down.”

“But then Bonny'll be in the kitchen half the morning.”

“When you get to be my age,” Louisa said, “why, food is near about everything there is, and I don't intend to rush it. I want a nice, hot English muffin, split with a fork, not a knife, with butter melting amongst the crumbs, and a steaming cup of coffee laced with whipping cream. And I want it in peace. I want it in quiet.”

“Bonny's going to have a fit,” he said.

“Don't be silly. Bonny doesn't mind such things.”

She was probably right. (Bonny was infinitely expansible, taking everything as it came. It was Morgan who felt oppressed by his mother's living here.) He sighed
and settled next to her on the couch. He opened out his paper. “Isn't this a weekday?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he mumbled.

She crooked a finger over the top of his paper and pulled it down so she could see his face. “Aren't you going to work?”

“By and by.”

“By and
by?
It's seven-thirty, Morgan and you don't even have your shoes on. Do you know what I've done so far today? Made my bed, watered my ferns, polished the chrome in my bathroom; and meanwhile here you sit reading the comics, and your sister's sleeping like the dead upstairs. What is this with my children? Where do they get this? By and by you say!”

He gave up. He folded the paper and said, “All
right
, Mother.”

“Have a nice day,” she told him serenely.

When he left the room, she was sitting with her hands in her lap again, trustful as a child, waiting for her English muffin.

2

W
earing a pair of argyle socks that didn't go at all with his Klondike costume, and crusty leather boots to cover them up, and his olive-drab parka from Sunny's Surplus, Morgan loped along the sidewalk. His hardware store was deep in the city, too far to travel on foot, and unfortunately his car was spread all over the floor of his garage and he hadn't quite finished putting it back together. He would have to take the bus. He headed toward the transit stop, puffing on a cigarette
that he held between thumb and forefinger, sending out a cloud of smoke from beneath the brim of his hat. He passed a row of houses, an apartment building, then a little stream of drugstores and newsstands and dentists' offices. Under one arm he carried a brown paper bag with his moccasins inside. They went with his Daniel Boone outfit. He'd worn them so often that the soft leather soles had broken through at the ball of the foot. When he reached the corner, he swerved in at Fresco's Shoe Repair to leave them off. He liked the smell of Fresco's: leather and machine oil. Maybe he should have been a cobbler.

But when he entered, jingling the cowbell above the door, he found no one there—just the counter with its clutter of awls and pencils and receipt forms, the pigeonholes behind it crammed with shoes, and a cup of coffee cooling beside the skeletal black sewing machine. “Fresco?” he called.

“Yo,” Fresco said from the rear.