Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [39]
They moved to Baltimore, but the letters followed, for all his mother had to do was ask Aunt Mercer for his new address. And Leon went on throwing the letters away. Maybe eventually he’d have opened one (this couldn’t last forever, could it?), but then the Merediths did something unforgivable. They gave his forwarding address to his draft board.
It wasn’t malicious, Emily was certain, but Leon thought it was. “That’s my parents for you,” he said. “They’d rather have me dead in the jungle than alive and happy without them.” He went on cursing them even after he failed the physical. One leg was found to be an inch and a half shorter than the other, the result of a broken thighbone in his childhood. No one had ever noticed it before. He returned with a painful limp and said, “I’m free, but I won’t forget what they tried to do to me.” And he continued throwing their letters away.
If Emily’s name had been on the envelopes too, she’d have opened them. She was pregnant by then and wishing for her mother. Aunt Mercer was no use—with her dim, steely handwriting: The crocuses are late this year and the rodents have been at my galanthus bulbs—and Mrs. Apple was sympathetic but had no recollection of childbirth. (“Perhaps I was put to sleep,” she said. “Do they give anesthesia for such things? I may have been asleep the whole nine months, in fact.”) Emily dreamed that Mrs. Meredith would suddenly arrive in person, miraculously plumper and more motherly, and she’d fold Emily into her lap and let her be a daughter again. But she never did.
Then, three months after Gina’s birth, there it was: Mrs. Leon Meredith. Emily marveled at how long it had taken. She smuggled the letter into the bathroom and locked the door behind her to read it. I know it must be you who’s keeping our boy from us. I saw from the start you were a cold little person. But he is our only child. Think how we must feel.
Emily was stunned. She couldn’t believe that anyone would be so unfair. Her eyes blurred and the sheets of bricks shimmered in the window.
Why are you saying these things? she wrote back. I have nothing to do with any of this and I don’t understand it. It’s between you and Leon.
His mother said, It seems you must have taken offense at something. Please, could we start over? Could we meet at the Elmwood this Wednesday at noon?
Emily didn’t want to meet her. She felt like ripping the letter to shreds. She looked at Gina, who lay crowing in her cardboard box, and she tried to imagine anything Gina could do—marrying, mismarrying, committing murder—that would sever her from Emily’s life as Leon had severed himself from his parents’. There was nothing. She just wouldn’t allow it. Gina was the whole point; even what Emily felt for Leon seemed pallid by comparison. She smoothed the letter on her lap and saw Mrs. Meredith’s tense, powdery face, with the eyebrows plucked as thin as two arched wires and the lids beneath them always a little puffed, as if she were on the edge of tears.
There were certain rules, Emily had been taught. She would have to go just this once.
Mrs. Meredith came by taxi, all the way from Richmond. Evidently, she didn’t drive, and had simply hired a cab for the day. The driver sat at the next table, spreading pâté on a cracker and reading Male magazine. Mrs. Meredith waited behind a foggy martini glass. Her back was very straight. Then Emily entered with Gina riding the way she liked to in those days-hanging over Emily’s forearm, with her bottom propped against Emily’s hip, frowning