Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [118]
Emily loved it all.
She began to understand why Morgan’s daughters kept coming home when they had to convalesce from something. You could draw vitality from mere objects, evidently—from the seething souvenirs of dozens of lives raced through at full throttle. Morgan’s mother and sister (both, in their ways, annoying, demanding, querulous women) troubled her not a bit, because they weren’t hers. They were too foreign to be hers. Foreign: that was the word. All she touched, dusted, and edged around was part of a foreign country, mysterious and exotic. She drew in deep breaths, as if trying to taste the difference in the air. She was fascinated by her son, who did not seem really, truly her own, though she loved him immeasurably. At meals, she tended to keep silent and to watch everybody with a small, pleased smile. At night in bed, she never lost her surprise at finding herself alongside this bearded man, this completely other person. She felt drawn to him by something far outside herself—by strings that pulled her, by ropes. Waking in the dark, she rolled toward him with a kind of stunned sensation. She was conscious of their two surfaces meeting noticeably: oil and water.
But Morgan said they had to move to some place bigger—a place with more bathrooms, at least. He was sorry, he said, to be putting her through this. He knew she had never bargained on having his female relatives dumped at her door like stray cats. (Actually, they had climbed the stairs themselves, wearing gloves, but it was true that Bonny’d just dropped them off in front of the building.) He would like, he said, a house in the country—a large, bare farmhouse. However, there was the matter of money. Even keeping this apartment was difficult, nowadays. Mrs. Apple had raised the rent. She was not as friendly as she’d once been, Emily thought. And Morgan had lost his job. Emily felt that this was spitefulness on Bonny’s part. Why should Morgan’s private arrangements affect his work at Cullen Hardware? But Morgan said that was Uncle Ollie’s doing, not Bonny’s. In fact, he said, Uncle Ollie had seemed to leap at the opportunity—had rushed to the store as soon as he heard the news and flung Morgan’s wardrobe onto the sidewalk, the selfsame wardrobe Bonny had flung there earlier. (People were so eager to get rid of his clothes, Morgan mourned.) It so happened that Morgan was out, at the time. He returned to find Uncle Ollie planted in front of the store, rising from a billow of hats. “Is it true what they tell me?” “Yes.” “Then you’re fired.” If he had said, “No,” Morgan claimed, Uncle Ollie would no doubt have been disappointed. He must have been waiting all along for such a chance.
Now Morgan had no steady employment, although a couple of times a week he clerked at the plumbing-supply store down the street. Emily tried to make more and more puppets, faster and faster, working late at night while Josh was asleep. Whenever Morgan saw her bent over her sewing machine, he apologized. He said, “You look like someone in an ad for unions.” What he didn’t understand was that Emily felt happier now than she’d ever felt before. She rattled inside this new life like … well, like Morgan in one of his hats, she supposed. But he went on apologizing. He couldn’t believe she didn’t mind.
When the time arrived for Leon to drive to Baltimore and pick up Gina, Emily cleaned the apartment so he wouldn’t imagine she had let things go. But she didn’t try to straighten the clutter, or get Brindle out of her bathrobe. And she didn’t hide Morgan’s collection of outdated Esso maps or his latest woodworking project—a formless bundle of two-by-fours leaning in a corner of the bathroom.
It was a Saturday he was coming. Saturday morning she got up early, not that she had any choice: Joshua woke her. She took him out to the kitchen and fed him, balancing his warm, damp weight in her lap. He waved his