Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [11]
The cabinets in this kitchen reached clear to the high ivory ceiling. They were stuffed with tarnished silver tea services and dusty stemware that no one ever used. Jammed in front of them were ketchup bottles and cereal boxes and scummy plastic salt-and-pepper sets with rice grains in the salt from last summer when everything had stuck to itself. Fool house! Something had gone wrong with it, somehow. It was so large and formal and gracious—a wedding present from Bonny’s father, who had been a wealthy man. Bonny had inherited a portion of his money. When the children stepped through the attic floor, it was Bonny who dialed the plasterers, and she was always having the broken windowpanes replaced, the shutters rehung when they sagged off their hinges, the masonry put back in chinks where the English ivy had clawed it away; but underneath, Morgan never lost the feeling that something here was slipping. If they could just clear it out and start over, he sometimes thought. Or sell it! Sell it and have done with it, buy a plainer, more straightforward place. But Bonny wouldn’t hear of it—something to do with capital gains; he didn’t know. It just never was the proper time, any time he brought it up.
The three smaller bedrooms, intended for a tasteful number of children, barely contained Morgan’s daughters, and Brindle and Louisa shared an edgy, cramped existence on the third floor. The lawn was littered with rusty bicycles and raveling wicker furniture where Bonny’s father had surely imagined civilized games of croquet. And nowadays apartment buildings were sprouting all around them, and the other houses were splitting into units and filling up with various unsortable collections of young people, and traffic was getting fierce. They seemed to be deep in the city. Well, all right. Morgan himself had been reared in the city, and had nothing against it whatsoever. Still, he kept wondering how this could have happened. As near as he could recall, he had planned on something different. He had married his wife for her money, to be frank, which was not to say he didn’t love her; it was just that he’d been impressed, as well, by the definiteness that money had seemed to give her. It had hovered somewhere behind her left shoulder, cloaking her with an air of toughness and capability. She was so clear about who she was. Courting her, Morgan had specifically bought a yachting cap with an eagle on the front, and white duck trousers and a brass-buttoned blazer to wear while visiting at her family’s summer cottage. He had sat outside on the terrace, securely defined at last, toying with the goblet of tropical punch that Bonny’s father had insisted on mixing for him—although in fact Morgan didn’t drink, couldn’t drink, had never been able to. Drinking made him talk too much. It made him spill the beans, he felt. He was trying to stay in character.
Staying in character, he had asked her father for Bonny’s hand. Her father gave his approval; Morgan had wondered why. He was only a penniless graduate student with no foreseeable future. And he knew that he was nothing much to look at. (In those days he wore no beard, and there was something monkeyish and clumsy about his face.) When he took Bonny out somewhere, to one of her girlfriends’ parties, he felt he was traveling under false pretenses. He felt he had entered someone else’s life. Only Bonny belonged there—an easygoing, pleasant girl, two or three years older than Morgan, with curly brown hair worn low on her neck in a sort of ball-shaped ponytail. Later, Morgan figured out that her father must have miscalculated. When you’re rich enough, he must have thought, then it doesn’t matter who you marry; you’ll go on the same as ever. So he had nodded his blessing and given them this house, and expected that nothing would change. Luckily for him, he died soon after the wedding. He never saw the mysterious way the house started slipping downward, or sideways, or whatever