Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [19]
He enjoyed imagining their eat-in kitchen, with just two plates and two sets of silver and an earthenware bowl for the baby. He liked to think that their bathroom contained a bar of Ivory soap and three hotel towels. Well, and Leon’s shaving things, of course. But nothing else. No bath oil, talcum tins, acne creams, hairdryers, children’s orthodontic appliances, mingled bottles of perfume swearing at each other, dangling bras and nylons and lace-edged shower caps. He gazed longingly after the Merediths. Their two oval faces swung away, private and impenetrable. Their daughter’s face was round as a coin, and stayed visible long after her parents had turned their backs on him, but she was no easier to read.
Of course, what he should have done was gallop across and catch up with them. “Remember me? Dr. Morgan. Remember? What a coincidence! I just chanced to be in the neighborhood, you see …” It wouldn’t be difficult. He could take the baby’s pulse, inquire about her DPT shots. Doctoring was so easy—a matter of mere common sense. It was almost too easy. He’d have more trouble sustaining the role of electrician, or one of those men who blow insulating material between the walls of houses.
Nevertheless, something stopped him. He felt awed by the Merediths—by their austerity, their certitude, their mapped and charted lives. He let them float away untouched, like people in a bubble.
4
Afternoon drifted over the store, and twilight sank into the corners. Butkins swallowed a yawn and mused at the window. Morgan invented an elaborate sort of paddlewheel device to tip squirrels off the bird feeder. He sanded each paddle carefully and fitted it into place. He felt comforted and steadied by this kind of work. It made him think of his father, a methodical man who might have been much happier as a carpenter than as an ineffectual high-school English teacher. “One thing our family has always believed in,” his father used to say, “is the very best quality tools. You buy the best tools for the job: drop-forged steel, hardwood handles. And then you take good care of them. Everything in its place. Lots of naval jelly.” It was the only philosophy he had ever stated outright, and Morgan clung to it now like something carved in stone. His father had killed himself during Morgan’s last year of high school. Without a hint of despair or ill health (though he’d always seemed somewhat muted), he had taken a room at the Winken Blinken Motor Hotel one starry April evening and slit both wrists with a razor blade. Morgan had spent a large part of his life trying to figure out why. All he wanted was a reason—bad debts, cancer, blackmail, an illicit love affair; nothing would have dismayed him. Anything would have been preferable to this nebulous, ambiguous trailing off. Had his father, perhaps, been wretched in his marriage? Fallen under the power of racketeers? Committed murder? He rifled his father’s correspondence, stole his desk key and his cardboard file box. He mercilessly cross-examined his mother, but she seemed no wiser than Morgan, or maybe she just didn’t want to talk about it. She went around silent and exhausted; she’d taken a job at Hutzler’s selling gloves. Gradually, Morgan stopped asking. The possibility had begun to settle on him, lately, as imperceptibly as dust, that perhaps there’d been no reason after all. Maybe a man’s interest in life could just thin to a trickle and dry up; was that it? He hated to believe it. He pushed the thought away, any time it came to him. And even now he often pored over the file box he had stolen, but he never found more than he’d found at the start: alphabetized instruction sheets for assembling bicycles, cleaning lawnmowers, and installing vacuum-cleaner belts. Repairing, replacing,