Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [64]
“He lets them lead him into saying he’s a glass-blower,” Bonny said, “and a tugboat captain for the Curtis Bay Towing Company, and a Mohawk Indian high-rise worker. And that’s just what I happen to hear; heaven knows what more there is.” Her lips twitched, as if she were hiding some amusement. “You’re walking down the street with him and this total stranger asks him when the International Brotherhood of Magicians is meeting next. You’re listening to a politician’s speech and suddenly you notice Morgan on the platform, sitting beside a senator’s wife with a carnation in his buttonhole. You’re waiting for your crabs at Lexington Market and who’s behind the counter but Morgan in a rubber apron, telling the other customers where he caught such fine oysters. It seems he has this boat that was handed down from an uncle on his mother’s side, a little bateau with no engine—”
“Engines disturb the beds,” said Morgan. “And I don’t like mechanical tonging rigs, either. What was good enough for my uncle on my mother’s side is good enough for me, I say.”
Bonny smiled at him and shook her head. “You step out for two minutes to buy milk, leaving him safe home in his pajamas, and coming back you pass him on the corner in a satin cap and purple satin shirt, telling four little boys the secret that made him the only undefeated jockey in the history of Pimlico. A jockey, six feet tall! Why do they all believe him? He never used a crop, you see, but only whispered in the horse’s ear. He whispered something that sounded like a crop. What was the word?”
“Scintillate,” Morgan said.
“Oh, yes,” said Bonny. She laughed.
Morgan trotted in his chair, holding imaginary reins. “Scintillate, scintillate,” he whispered, and Bonny laughed harder and wiped her eyes.
“He’s impossible,” she told Emily. “He’s just … impossible to predict, you see.”
“I can imagine he must be,” Emily said politely.
She was beginning to like Bonny (her pink, merry face, and the helpless way she sank back in her chair), but she thought less of Morgan. It had never occurred to her that he knew exactly how people saw him, and that he enjoyed their astonishment and perhaps even courted it. She frowned at him. Morgan pulled his nose reflectively.
“She’s right,” he said. “I make things difficult. But I plan to change. Hear that, Bonny?”
“Oh, do you, now?” Bonny said. She stood up to raise the kitchen window. “I don’t know what to make of my garden,” she said, looking out at the yard. “I was certain I’d planted vegetables someplace, but it seems to be coming up all flowers.”
“I mean it,” Morgan said. He told Emily, “She doesn’t believe me. Bonny, don’t you see what’s here in front of you? Here’s Emily Meredith; I brought her home. I brought her to our house. I told her and Leon, both, exactly who I was. I told about you and the girls. They know about Amy’s new baby and the time Kate smashed the car.”
“Is that right?” Bonny asked Emily.
Emily nodded.
“Well, I can’t think what for,” Bonny said. “I can’t think why he bored you with all that.”
“I’m combining my worlds!” Morgan said, and he raised his coffee cup to Bonny.
But Bonny said, “There’s a catch to it somewhere. There’s something missing. I don’t understand what he wants.”
Emily didn’t understand either. She shook her head; Bonny shook hers. In fact, it seemed that Bonny and Emily were the old friends and Morgan was the newcomer. He sat slightly apart, perched under his helmet like an elf under a mushroom, turning his face from one to the other while the women watched, narrow-eyed, to see what he was up to.
1975
1
Even when Morgan fell asleep, he didn’t truly lose consciousness. Part of him slept while the rest of him stayed alert and jittery, counting things—thumbtacks, mattress buttons, flowers on a daughter’s dress, holes in a pegboard display of electrical fittings. A plumber came in and ordered some pipes: six elbows and a dozen nipples. “Certainly,” said Morgan, but he couldn’t help laughing. Then he was competing in a singing contest. He