Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [117]
Gina sniffed and said, “No, I’ll go.”
“You don’t have to, you know.”
“I want to.”
“They can’t force you.”
“I want to,” Gina said. “I want to get out of here! And never come back. I’m sick of everything always so messy, babies and diapers and those two old ladies taking up my bedroom. You just let them move right in on me. You acted glad to have them. Nobody else at St. Andrew’s sleeps on a fold-out bed. And that dog that snores, and Morgan’s stupid tools and things anyplace I want to sit. I’m fed up with him! Does he have to wear those hats all the time? Does he have to make such a show of himself?”
“Why, Gina!” Emily said.
But later, when they’d walked home, it was to Morgan that Gina acted friendliest. At lunch she kept giggling with him, and then flashing some kind of challenge at Emily with her flat, black, unreadable eyes.
4
“I’m much more free than I used to be,” Bonny said. “I mean, he used to color my world so. You know how that is?”
There was something wrong with the telephone. Other lines seemed to be spilling into it. Emily heard faint laughter and a burble of distant voices. “No,” she said, worming a screwdriver out of Joshua’s grasp. “No, not exactly.”
“Oh, he was so tiring! Everything had to be larger than life, extravagant, grandiloquent. Take my brother, Billy. You’ve met Billy. He hasn’t been lucky in marriage. He’s had three wives. But three is not an impossible number. I mean, the way Morgan always spoke of him, you’d think Billy’d been married dozens of times. ‘Now, who is his wife at the moment?’ he’d ask. ‘Do I know her name?’ And somehow we all fell in with it. Even Billy, it seemed, came to believe that he’d had this great, long train of wives. He made jokes about it, acted like a drop-in guest at his own weddings. There! See? I’m talking as if he had a wedding every week.”
Something was boiling over on the stove. At the kitchen table Brindle slouched in her long, white, dingy bathrobe, laying out her Tarot cards, and when she heard the hiss of steam she looked up, but she did nothing about it. Emily stepped over the dog, stretched to the end of her cord, and took the pan off the stove and set it in the sink. “Bonny, I’m cooking supper now,” she said.
“He only feels he’s real when he’s in other people’s eyes,” Bonny told her. “Things have to be viewed. All alone in the bathroom, he’s no one. That’s why his family doesn’t count. They tend not to see him; you know how families are. So he has to go out and find himself in someone else’s line of vision. Oh, how wearing he was! I blame it on his mother. She expected so much of him—especially after his father died. ‘You can be anything,’ she told him. He must have misunderstood. He thought she said, ‘You can be everything.’ ”
“He’s wonderful with Gina,” Emily said.
“I feel sorry for you,” Bonny said.
5
Trunks and dress forms, a rusty birdcage, barrels containing a gigantic cup-and-saucer collection muffled in straw, stacks of National Geographics, Brindle’s catalogs, Louisa’s autograph book, a samovar, a carton of records, a lady’s bicycle, a wicker elephant. And this was only what lined the hall, which had once been as empty as a tunnel. In the living room: two sets of encyclopedias (one general, one medical), a spread-out jigsaw puzzle, Louisa’s platform rocker with several yards of knitting coiled in the seat, and half a dozen runny watercolors of peaches, pears, and grapes-products of an art course Brindle had taken twenty years ago, back when she was married to her first husband. The husband himself (pink-faced, with a windowpane of white painted on his bald skull like the shine on an apple) hung in a curly gold frame above a bookcase full of manuals.
In Gina’s room there was almost no floor—just a field of bureaus and unmade beds. In Morgan’s and Emily’s room were more bureaus (two and a half for Morgan alone), the bed, the sewing machine, Gina’s old, yellowed crib with the tattered eyelet canopy they’d brought up from the basement for Joshua, and puppets dangling from the picture rails, since there wasn’t space in