Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [26]
Emily thought he was wonderful. She had never met anyone like him. Her own family had been so ordinary and pale; her childhood had been so unexceptional. (His had been terrible.) They began spending all their time together—nursing a single Pepsi through an afternoon in the canteen, studying in the library with their feet intertwined beneath the table. Emily was too shy to appear in any plays with him, but she was good with her hands and she signed on as a set-builder. She hammered platforms and stairsteps and balconies. She painted leafy woods on canvas flats, and then for the next play she transformed the woods into flowered wallpaper and mahogany-colored wainscoting. Meanwhile, it seemed that even this slim connection with the theatre was making her life more dramatic. There were scenes with his parents, at which she was an embarrassed observer—long tirades from his father, a Richmond banker, while his mother wiped her eyes and smiled politely into space. Evidently, the university had informed them that Leon’s grades were even lower than usual. If they didn’t improve, he was going to flunk out. Almost every Sunday his parents would drive all the way from Richmond just to sit in Leon’s overstuffed, faded dormitory parlor asking what kind of profession he could hope for with a high F average. Emily would rather have skipped these meetings, but Leon wanted her there. At first his parents were cordial to her. Then they grew less friendly. It couldn’t have been anything she’d done. Maybe it was what she hadn’t done. She was always reserved and quiet with them. She came from old Quaker stock and tended, she’d been told, to feel a little too comfortable in the face of long silences. Sometimes she thought things were going beautifully when in fact everybody else was casting about in desperation for something to talk about. So she tried harder to be sociable. She wore lipstick and stockings when she knew they were coming, and she thought up neutral subjects ahead of time. While Leon and his father were storming at each other, she’d be running through a mental card file searching for a topic to divert them. “Our class is reading Tolstoy now,” she told Leon’s mother one Sunday in April. “Do you like Tolstoy?”
“Oh, yes, we have it in leather,” said Mrs. Meredith, dabbing her nose with a handkerchief.
“Maybe Leon ought to take Russian literature,” Emily said. “We read plays too, you know.”
“Let him pass something in his own damn language first,” his father said.
“Oh, well, this is in English.”
“How would that help?” Mr. Meredith asked. “I believe his native tongue is Outer Mongolian.”
Meanwhile Leon was standing at the window with his back to them. Emily felt touched by his tousled hair and his despairing posture, but at the same time she couldn’t help wondering how he’d got them into this. His parents weren’t really the type to make scenes. Mr. Meredith was a solid, business-like man; Mrs. Meredith was so stately and self-controlled that it was remarkable she’d foreseen the need to bring a handkerchief. Yet every week something went wrong. Leon had this way of plunging into battle unexpectedly. He was quicker to go to battle than anyone she knew. It seemed he’d make a mental leap that Emily couldn’t follow, landing smack in the middle of rage when just one second before he