Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [52]
He was out of breath. He felt a white space inside his head, as if he were standing at an unaccustomed altitude. “Just hear what happened last summer,” he said. “I had this patient who’d been stabbed. Stabbed in front of a Fells Point bar, something to do with a woman. They brought him in and woke me in the dead of night. That’s the kind of practice I have—such fine patients. And no answering service, no condominium in Ocean City where I can vanish over the weekend … Anyhow. He had a long, shallow cut all down the left side, from the ribcage to the hipbone, fortunately clear of the heart. I laid him on the table in my office and stitched him up right then and there. Took me an hour and a quarter—a tiresome job, as you might imagine. Then just as I’m knotting the last stitch, wham! The door bursts open. In comes the man who stabbed him. Pulls out a knife and rips him down the right side, ribcage to hipbone. Back to the needle and thread. Another hour and a quarter.”
Leon gave a sudden snort of laughter, but Emily just nudged Morgan forward, Morgan resumed his descent, leaning heavily on the banister like someone old and rheumatic. He said, “They come to me with headaches, colds, black eyes … self-healing things. A man who does sedentary work—a taxi driver, say—will spend the weekend moving furniture and then call me out of bed on a Sunday night. ‘Doc, I got the most terrible backache. Do you think it could be a disk? A fusion? Will I need an operation?’ For this I went to medical school!”
“Here,” said Emily. They had reached the front door. She pushed it open for him and held out her hand. “Goodbye,” she told him. Leon grinned anxiously behind her, as if trying to ease the insult. Morgan took her hand and was startled by its lightness and its dryness.
“You don’t want to be friends at all, do you?” he said.
“No,” Emily told him.
“Ah,” he said. “And why would that be?”
“I don’t like how you try to get into our lives. I hate it! I don’t like being pried into.”
“Emily,” Leon said.
“No, no,” Morgan told him. “It’s quite all right. I understand.” He looked away, toward his dusty, sagging car. He had no feelings whatsoever. It seemed he’d been emptied. “Maybe you could meet my wife,” he said with an effort. “Would you like to meet Bonny? Have I told you about her? Or you might like my children. I have very nice children, very normal, very ordinary; they seem determined to be ordinary … Two are in high school. One’s grown, really, a secretary; and four others are in college, here and there. Most of the year, they’re gone. We hardly hear from them. But that’s the way it is, right? Every parent says that. You can see that I’m a family man. Does that help? No, I guess it doesn’t.” It seemed he was still holding Emily’s hand. He dropped it. “The oldest girl’s getting married,” he said. “I’m not a doctor. I work in a hardware store.”
Emily said, “What?”
“I manage Cullen Hardware.”
“But … you delivered our baby!” she said.
“Ah, well,” he told her, “I haven’t witnessed three of my daughters’ births for nothing.” He patted all his pockets, hunting cigarettes, but when he found a pack, he just stood holding it and looking into their stunned faces. “That stabbing business, well, I read it in the paper,” he said. “I presented myself untruthfully. I do that often, in fact. I often find myself giving a false impression. It’s not something I intend, you understand. It almost seems that other people conspire with me, push me into it. That day you called for a doctor in the house: no one else came forward. There was this long, long silence. And it seemed like such a simple thing—offer some reassurance, drive you to the hospital. I had no inkling I’d actually