Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [43]
“And it’s not just the size; it’s the weather,” Bonny said. “What if it rains? You know how the weather can be in April.”
“But this is already March,” Morgan said.
“We’ll all sit down this evening,” said Bonny, “and come to some decision.”
So Morgan went to his closet and chose an appropriate costume: a pinstriped suit he’d laid claim to after Bonny’s father died. It stood out too far at the shoulders, maybe, but he thought it might have been what Mr. Cullen was wearing when Morgan asked him for permission to marry Bonny. And certainly he’d been wearing his onyx cufflinks. Morgan found the cufflinks in the back of a drawer, and he spent some time struggling to slip them through the slick, starched cuffs of his only French-cuffed shirt.
But when the four of them sat down for their discussion, no one consulted Morgan in any way whatsoever. All they talked about was food. Was it worthwhile calling in a caterer, or should they prepare the food themselves? Amy thought a caterer would be simplest. Jim, however, preferred that things be homemade. Morgan wondered how he could say that, having eaten so many suppers here. Bonny wasn’t much of a cook. She leaned heavily on sherry—several glugs of it in any dish that she felt needed more zip. Everything they ate, almost, tasted like New York State cocktail sherry.
Morgan sat in the rocking chair and plucked out his beard, strand by strand. If he got up right now and left, he told himself, they might not even notice. He reflected on a long-standing grievance: there was one of Bonny’s pregnancies that she’d forgotten to inform him about. It was the time she’d been expecting Liz, or maybe Molly. Bonny always said he was mistaken; of course she’d told him, she recalled it clearly. But Morgan knew better. He suspected, even, that she’d neglected to tell him on purpose: he tended to get annoyed by her slapdash attitude toward various birth-control methods. To his certain knowledge, the very first inkling he’d had of that pregnancy was when Bonny arrived in the kitchen one morning wearing the baggy blue chambray shirt she habitually used as a maternity smock. He was positive he would have remembered if she’d mentioned it to him.
“Amy will start down the stairs,” Bonny said. Evidently, they were planning the actual ceremony now. “Her father will meet her at the bottom and walk her to the center of the living room.”
“Daddy, promise me you won’t wear one of your hats,” Amy said.
Morgan rocked in his chair and plucked on, thinking of the tall black father-of-the-bride top hat he would purchase for the occasion. He knew just where he could find one: Tuxedo Tom’s Discount Formal Wear. He began to feel slightly happier.
But later, when Jim and Amy had gone out, he sank into a spell of sadness. He thought of what a sunny child Amy had been when she was small. She’d had large, exaggerated curls swooping upward at each ear, so that she seemed to be wearing a Dutch cap. That Dutch-capped child, he thought, was whom he really mourned—not the present Amy, twenty-one years old, efficient secretary for a life-insurance company. He recalled how he had once worried over her safety. He’d been a much more anxious parent than Bonny. “You know,” he told Bonny, “I used to be so certain that one of the children would die. Or all of them, even—I could picture that. I was so afraid they’d be hit by cars, or kidnapped, or stricken with polio. I’d warn them to look both ways, not to run with scissors, never to play with ropes or knives or sharp sticks. ‘Relax,’ you’d say. Remember? But now look: it’s as if they died after all. Those funny little roly-poly toddlers, Amy in her OshKosh overalls—they’re dead, aren’t they? They did die. I was right all along. It’s just that it happened more slowly than I’d foreseen.”
“Now, dear, this is just an ordinary life development,” Bonny told him.
He looked at her. She was seated at the kitchen table, working on the guest list for the