Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [46]
On this same stringy rug he had walked her for hours when she was just newborn. He had nestled her head on his shoulder and paced the length of the rug and back, growling lullabies. The memory didn’t stir him. It was just there, just another, lower layer in this room that was full of layers. He led her up to Bonny’s minister, a man he disliked. (He disliked all ministers.) Amy dropped his arm and took a place next to what’s-his-name, Jim. Morgan stepped back and stood with his feet planted apart, his hands joined behind him. He rocked a little to the lullaby in his head.
“Who gives this woman to be married?” the minister said. From the way the question rang in the silence, Morgan suspected it might have been asked once before without his noticing. He seemed to have missed part of the service. “Her mother and I do,” he said. It would have been more accurate to say, “Her mother does.” He turned and found his seat next to Bonny, who was looking beautiful and calm in a blue dress with a wide scoop neckline that kept slipping off one or the other of her shoulders. She laid a hand on top of his. Morgan noticed a gray thread of cobweb dangling from the ceiling.
Jim put a ring on Amy’s finger. Amy put a ring on Jim’s finger. They kissed. Morgan thought of a plan: he would go live with them in their new apartment. They didn’t know a thing, not a thing. No doubt they’d have broken all their kitchen machines within a week and their household accounts would be a shambles, and then along would come Morgan to repair and advise. He would go as an old man, one of those really bereft old men with no teeth, no job, no wife, no family. In some small area he would act helpless, so that Amy would feel a need to care for him. He would arrive, perhaps, without buttons on his shirt, and would ask her to sew them on for him. He had no idea how to do it himself, he would tell her. Actually, Morgan was very good at sewing on buttons. Actually, he not only sewed on his own buttons but also Bonny’s and the girls’, and patched their jeans and altered their hemlines, since Bonny wasn’t much of a seamstress. Actually, Amy was aware of this. She was also aware that he was not a toothless old man and that he did have a wife and family. The trouble with fathering children was, they got to know you so well. You couldn’t make the faintest little realignment of the facts around them. They kept staring levelly into your eyes, eternally watchful and critical, forever prepared to pass judgment. They could point to so many places where you had gone permanently, irretrievably wrong.
3
There’d been a compromise on the food. Bonny had ordered several trays from the deli, and then Morgan had picked up some cheese and some crackers which the girls had put together this morning. He’d been upset to discover that there was apparently no discount outlet for gourmet cheeses. “Do you know what these things cost?” he asked the groom’s father, who had a hand poised over a cracker spread with something blue-veined. Then he wandered across the yard to check on the Camembert. It was surrounded by three young children—possibly Jim’s nephews. “This one smells like a stable,” the smallest was saying.
“It smells like a gerbil cage.”
“It smells like the … elephant