Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [108]
“Mr. Gower, honestly,” the doctor said. He sighed. “Why you have to take every stage of your life so much more to heart than ordinary people—”
Immediately, Morgan felt reassured. So this was merely a stage, then! He turned to the couple and said, “I beg your pardon. Have I told you that? I’m sorry to seem so rude.” The couple stared at him with blank, unformed faces.
“Show her into the room next door,” the doctor said. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
“Oh, thank you, Fogarty,” Morgan said.
He felt a rush of affection for the man—his benign expression and his puffy gray mustache. It must be wonderful to view events so matter-of-factly. Maybe Morgan ought to shave his beard off and wear only a mustache. He stumbled out of the office, tentatively fingering his whiskers. He went back to the waiting room, where Emily was sitting alert, ready to fly, on a loveseat next to a pear-shaped woman in a smock. The receptionist didn’t even glance at him. (Maybe this happened every day.) He beckoned to Emily, and she rose and came toward him. He led her to the room beside the doctor’s office, the one that was full of equipment, and he helped her take her coat off. There was no place to hang it. He folded it into a wrinkled, oval bundle and set it on an enameled cabinet. “Didn’t I tell you?” he asked Emily. “Everything will be all right. I’ll take care of you, sweetheart.”
Emily stood looking at him.
“Sit down,” he told her. He steered her toward the examining table. She sat gingerly on the foot of it, smoothing her skirt around her.
Then Morgan started circling the room. All the instruments struck him as gruesome—tongs and pincers. What a world of innards women lived in! He shook his head. In one corner he found a hospital scale. The last person to stand on it had weighed a hundred and eighty-two pounds. “Mercy,” he said disapprovingly. He slid the weights to the left. They felt solid and authoritative. “Ahem, young lady,” he told Emily, “if you’ll just hop on our scales, please …”
“I should have called a clinic. Family Planning or something,” Emily said, as if to herself. “I meant to, every day, but I don’t know, lately it seems I’ve got locked in place, frozen.”
“Would you like a johnny coat?” Morgan asked, rooting through the cabinet. “Look here, they’re pink. Just slip into our Schiaparelli johnny coat, Miss …”
Emily didn’t respond. She was holding herself tense, with her hands clasped tightly in her lap.
Morgan went over and touched her arm. “Emily. Don’t worry,” he said. “This will all work out. Emily? Am I getting on your nerves? Do you want me to leave? Yes, I’ll go outside and wait for you, that’s a good idea … Emily, don’t feel bad.”
She still didn’t answer.
He left and went to sit in the waiting room. He chose a chair in the corner, as far as possible from the pear-shaped woman. Even so, she seemed to be pressing in on him. She gave off a swelling, insistent warmth, although she pretended not to and seemed immersed in a Baby Talk magazine. Morgan let his head drop and covered his eyes with his fingers. Everything was a bluff. He knew the truth by now, however long it might take Fogarty to prove it scientifically. This was it. This was it.
He was done for.
The woman flipped the pages of her magazine, and car horns honked in the distance, and the telephone rang with a muted, purring sound. Morgan raised his head and stared at the oak door. He began to see the situation from another angle. An assignment had been given him. Someone’s life, a small set of lives, had been placed in the palm of his hand. Maybe he would never have any more purpose than this: to accept the assignment gracefully, lovingly, and do the best he could with it.
6
On Wednesday morning, after Emily heard from the doctor, Morgan came home from work to tell Bonny. Bonny had launched one of her spring-cleaning attacks that always made the house seem untidier than before. Morgan could smell the dust flying the minute he walked in. She was in the dining room, wearing a kerchief over her hair, washing down her ancestors’ portraits