Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [42]
They never asked, of course, whether she was worth it. They centered their lives on her. They could marvel forever at the small, chilly point of her nose, or her fat-ringed fingers or precisely cut mouth. When finally she fell asleep, the absence of all that fierce energy made the apartment feel desolate. Emily would drift through the rooms not knowing what to do next, though she’d wanted to do so much all day and never had a chance to begin. She wondered how they’d managed to produce such a child. She herself had always been so subdued and so anxious to please; Leon had Gina’s fire but none of her joyous good nature. Where did she get that? She was a changeling. She had arrived with someone else’s qualities. She was the gnome’s baby, not theirs.
He stood in the Laundromat doorway with his hat pulled low and he sank back into the darkness as they passed. Sometimes the hat was pointed, sometimes flat, sometimes broad-brimmed. Sometimes it seemed he had aged, was slackening, falling apart as certain people suddenly do; he was seen in gold-rimmed spectacles and his beard was cut to such a stubble that he might merely have neglected shaving himself. Then later he would reappear miraculously young again, the spectacles gone, the beard in full bloom. On occasion he was not gnomish at all but a rather beakish, distinguished gentleman in suits so tidy you had the impression someone else had dressed him. On other occasions he could have stepped into a puppet show and not been out of place. He had a gait they would know anywhere, that seemed to belong to someone much younger—a reckless, bent-kneed, lunging gait, half running, landing on the balls of his feet. But once he was seen plodding out of a secondhand-clothing store with the resigned deliberation of a middle-aged man, and he had let his hair grow unsuitably long so it straggled in an unkempt and pathetic way over the back of his collar. At Christmas, Leon thought he saw him at a puppet show all the way over near Washington; but maybe it was just someone like him, he said. Then later he told Emily he’d been stupid—not for thinking it was he (the man was everywhere, after all), but for imagining there could be anyone else, anyplace, at any time, the faintest bit like Morgan.
1971
1
Morgan’s oldest daughter was getting married. It seemed he had to find this out by degrees; nobody actually told him. All he knew was that over a period of months one young man began visiting more and more often, till soon a place was set for him automatically at suppertime and he was consulted along with the rest of the family when Bonny wanted to know what color to paint the dining room. His name was Jim. He had the flat, beige face of a department-store mannequin, and he seemed overly fond of crew-necked sweaters. And Morgan couldn’t think of a thing to say to him. All he had to do was look at this fellow and a peculiar kind of lassitude would seep through him. Suddenly he would be struck by how very little there was in this world that was worth the effort of speech, the entanglements of grammar and pronunciation and sufficient volume of voice.
Then Amy started beginning every sentence with “we.” We think this and we hope that. And finally: when we’re earning a little more money; when we find a good apartment; when we have children of our own. This just crept in, so to speak. No announcements