Morgan's Passing (30 page)

“I suppose we'll have to sell this place,” Aunt Junie said, moving laboriously along the sidewalk. “There isn't much point in keeping up two houses now.”

“But where will you live, Aunt Junie?”

“Oh, I'd move in with Claire and Claude,” she said.

Emily thought of something dark, like an eye, contracting and getting darker. There once had been three houses, long ago when Emily's father was still alive.

Aunt Junie shuffled ahead of Emily through the front door. A lamp glowed in the hall, casting a circle of yellow light. “You ought to pick out what you want here,” Aunt Junie said. “Why, some of it's antiques. Pick out what you'd like to take home.”

She leaned on Emily's arm, and they made their way
to the living room. Emily turned a light on. Furniture sprang into view, each piece with its sharp shadow—a drop-leaf table with its rear leaf raised against the wall; a wing chair; a desk with slender, curved legs that used to remind Emily of a skinny lady in high-heeled shoes. She could have taken all of this, heaven knows. Offered, in general terms, a desk or a sofa, she would have said, “Oh, thank you. Our apartment does seem bare.” A little itch of greed might have started up, in fact. But when she stood in this room and saw the actual objects, she didn't want them. They were too solid, too thickly coated by past events, maybe; she couldn't explain it. She said, “Aunt Junie, sell it. You could surely find some use for the money.”

“Take something small, at least,” Aunt Junie said. “Emily, honey, you're our only young person. You and your little daughter: you're all we've got to pass things on to.”

Emily pictured Gina reading in the wing chair, twining a curl at her temple the way she always did when she was absorbed. (Was she in bed yet? Had she brushed her teeth? Did Leon know she still liked a nightlight, even if she wouldn't say so?) She missed Gina's watchful eyes and her delicate, colorless, chipped-looking mouth—Aunt Mercer's mouth. Emily had never realized. She stopped dead, struck by the thought.

Meanwhile, Aunt Junie traveled around the room, holding her crippled arm with her good hand. “This china slipper, maybe. Or these little brass monkeys: hear no evil, see no evil …”

“Aunt Junie, really, we don't lead that kind of life,” Emily told her.

“What kind of life? What kind of life must it take just to put a few brass monkeys on your coffee table?”

“We don't
have
a coffee table,” Emily said, smiling.

“Take Mercer's, then.”

“No. Please.”

“Or jewelry, a watch, a brooch. Pin her bar pin on your collar.”

“I don't have a collar, either,” Emily said. “I only wear these leotards, and they're made of something knit; they can't be pinned.”

Aunt Junie turned and looked at her. She said, “Oh, Emily, your mother sent you off so nice. She read up in
Mademoiselle
and made you all those clothes for college. She was worried you'd be dressed wrong. No one
else
in your class went away to school, none of those Baptists, those Haithcocks and Biddixes. She wanted you to go off nice and show them all, come back educated, settle down, marry someone good to you like my Claire did; see my Claire? And she fixed you that sweet paisley dress with the little white collar and cuffs. Now,
that
you could pin a brooch on. She said you could wear it to Meeting. You said, ‘Mama, I do not intend to go to Meeting there and all I want is blue jeans. I'm getting out,' you said, ‘I'm going to
join
, get to be part of some big group, not going to be different ever again.' What a funny little thing you were! But of course she paid you no mind, and rightly so, as you can see; quite rightly so. Now, I don't know what you call this: leotard? Is that it? Well, I'm sure it's all very stylish in Baltimore, but Emily, honey, it can't hold a candle to that paisley dress your mother made.”

“That paisley dress is gone,” Emily said. “It's twelve years old. It's cleaning windows now.”

Aunt Junie turned her face away. She looked stony and blind with hurt. She groped through the furniture-chair, desk, another chair—and reached the sofa and lowered herself into it.

“But of course I wore it,” Emily said, lying.

She pictured it still hanging in her dormitory closet, a ghost passed on to each new freshman class. (“This dress belonged to Miss Emily Cathcart, who vanished one Sunday in April and was never seen again. College authorities are still dragging Sophomore Pond. Her spirit is said to haunt the fountain in front of the library.”)

She sat down beside Aunt Junie. She touched her arm and said, “I'm sorry.”

“Oh, what for?” Aunt Junie asked brightly.

“If you like, I'll take the bar pin. Or something little, anything, or—I know what: the marionettes.”

“The—?”

“String puppets is what you called them. Didn't you say you'd kept them?”

“Yes,” said Aunt Junie, without interest. “Someplace or other, I guess.”

“I'll take one home with me.”

“Yes, I recollect now you said you give some kind of children's parties,” Aunt Junie said. She adjusted her paralyzed arm beneath the shelf of her bosom. “It's been a tiring day,” she said.

“You want me to help you to bed?”

“No, no, you run along. I can manage.”

Emily kissed her on the cheek. Aunt Junie didn't seem to notice.

In the room that Emily and her mother had once shared—such an intertwined, unprivate life that even now she didn't feel truly alone here—she untied her skirt and stepped out of her shoes. Her own younger face, formless, smiled from a silver frame on the bureau. She switched off the light, folded back the spread, and climbed into bed. The sheets were so cold they felt damp. She hugged herself and clenched her chattering teeth and watched the same old squares of moonlight on the floor. Aunt Junie, meanwhile, seemed to be moving around in some other part of the house. Drawers slid open, latches clicked. Emily thought she heard the rafters creak in the attic. Oh, this leaden, lumbering world of old people! She slid away into a patchwork kind of sleep. Her mother seemed to be rearranging the bedroom. “Let's see, now, if the chair were here, the table here, if we were to put the bed beneath the window …” Emily sat up once to pull the spread back over her shoulders for warmth. An owl was hooting in
the trees. This time when she slept, it was like plummeting into someplace bottomless.

She woke and found the room filled with a pearly gray, pre-dawn light. She got up, staggering slightly, and reached for her skirt and tied it around her. She put on her shoes and went out to the hall, which was darker. From Aunt Junie's room a snoring noise came. Oh, Lord, they would probably all sleep for hours yet. She felt her way to the living room to find her purse, where she'd stashed a comb and toothbrush. It was on the coffee table. Something knobby poked from it. She turned the lamp on, blinked, and lifted out an ancient female marionette in a calico dress.

The head and hands were plaster, crudely colored. She had a large, faded mouth and two dim circles of rouge. Her black thread hair was in braids. Her tangled strings were tied to a single-cross control bar, just like the one that Emily had invented. Or maybe (it began to seem) she had not invented it after all, but had remembered it from her childhood. Though she couldn't recall ever having been shown this little creature. Maybe it was something that was passed in the dark through the generations—the very thought of giving puppet shows, even. And here she imagined she'd come so far, lived such a different existence! She saw her Red Riding Hood scene in a whole new light now, as something crippled. She held the marionette by its snarl of strings. The blue eyes stared at her flatly. The plaster hands—one finger chipped—were suspended in a gracious, stiff position.

Out in the kitchen a clock ticked with a muffled sound, as if buried. There was barely enough room to walk between chairs and occasional tables. Everything was so stuffed and smothering. She set the marionette on the sofa and picked up her purse and left the room. Fresh air, she thought, might clear her head. She opened the door and stepped out on the porch, where instantly the cold pierced all she wore. But still the stuffy feeling didn't leave her. She descended the steps. She went out to the street and stood shivering and looking at the car—Leon's
car, compact and gleaming. After a moment she opened the door and slid inside and took a deep breath of its leathery smell. Then she found her keys in her purse. Then she switched the engine on, but not the headlights, and slipped away.

In Baltimore it was a crowded, clamorous morning in the middle of the week, with the sun flashing off a sea of metal and everyone honking and darting in and out of lanes. Emily turned down Crosswell Street and parked somewhere, anywhere, she didn't know. She flew from the car and ran inside the building and up the stairs, and then couldn't find the proper key and was jingling her way through a ring of them when Leon opened the door. He stood there looking down at her, holding a book in one hand, and she threw her arms around him and pressed her face to his chest. “Emily, love,” he said. “Emily, is something wrong?” She only shook her head, and hung on tight.

5

A
lmost daily she had letters from Morgan, whether or not he came in person.
Dear Emily, Am enclosing this Sears ad, you really need a pipe wrench and Sears are better than any Cullen Hardware sells
 … For he had taken over the care of their apartment, moving in on the disrepair that lurked in all its corners; he clanked blithely among the mysteries beneath the kitchen sink.
Dear Emily, Came across a hint last night that just might solve that trouble with your toaster. Simply cut a piece of heavy paper, say a match-book cover, 1″ x 1″ …

He was the Merediths' own personal consumer advocate, composing disgusted notes to Radio Shack on his tinny, old-fashioned typewriter, storming into auto-repair shops—solving whatever little discontent Emily mentioned in passing. She began to rely on him. Sometimes she said, “Oh, I really shouldn't ask you to do this—” but he would say, “Why not? Who would you rather ask instead? Ah, don't hurt my feelings, Emily.”

Once she had a problem with her tape recorder, the portable recorder she'd bought to use in their shows. Morgan didn't happen to be around, and while Emily fiddled with the buttons she caught herself wondering, irritably, where
was
he? How could he leave her alone like this, to cope without him when he'd led her to depend on him? She grabbed up the recorder and ran the several blocks to Cullen Hardware. She arrived breathless; she slapped the recorder on the counter between Morgan and a customer. “Listen,” she said, jabbing a button. In blew the trumpet for “The Brementown Musicians”—but blurred and bleary, with some kind of vibration in the speaker. The customer stepped back, looking startled. Morgan sat on his high wooden stool and nodded thoughtfully. “It's driving me crazy!” Emily told him, switching it off. “And if you think it sounds bad now, you ought to hear it when the volume's up, in the middle of a show. You can't tell if it's a trumpet or a foghorn.”

Morgan went to a revolving rack for a paintbrush, and he came back and took the recorder onto his lap and slowly, tenderly, brushed the plastic grooves that encased the speaker. Grains of something white flew out. “Sugar, perhaps. Or sand,” he said. “Hmm.” He pressed the button and listened again. The trumpet sound was clear and pure. He gave the machine back to Emily and returned to adding up the customer's purchases.

Like a household elf, he left behind him miraculously mended electrical cords, smooth-gliding windows, dripless faucets, and toilet tanks hung with clever arrangements
of coat-hanger wire to keep the water from running. “It must be wonderful,” Emily told Bonny, “to have him with you all the time, fixing things,” but Bonny just looked blank and said, “Who, Morgan?”

Well, Bonny had her mind on other matters. She was helping one of her daughters through a difficult pregnancy. The baby was due in February but kept threatening to arrive now, in early November; the daughter had come home to lie flat on her back for the next three months. It was all Bonny could talk about. “When she sits up just a little, to straighten a pillow,” she said, “I have this picture of the baby falling, just tumbling out of her like a penny out of a piggy-bank, you know? I say, ‘Lizzie, honey, lie down this instant, please.' It's turning around my view of things. I used to think of pregnancy as getting something ready, growing something to finish it; now all I think of is holding something back that is going to come regardless. And Morgan! Well, you know Morgan. Always off somewhere, he really has no comprehension … At night he comes home and reads her stories from the operas. He's taken up an interest in the opera, has he told you? Such a crazy man … ‘Don Giovanni encounters a statue and invites it home to supper,' he reads. ‘Sounds like something
you
would do,' I tell him. He reads on. I believe he thinks that Liz is still a child, in need of bedtime stories; or maybe he just likes an excuse to read them himself—but for day-to-day things! For bringing trays to her and emptying bedpans!”