Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [67]
“Yes, I should think so,” she said. She patted his arm again, and they walked on. She said, “Let’s see now. How long have we been here?”
“Three days, Mother.”
“Eleven more to go,” she said.
“Yes.”
She said, “Heavens.”
“Maybe our family wasn’t cut out for vacations,” Morgan said. “Maybe not.”
“It must be the work ethic,” he said.
“Well, I don’t know what that is. It’s more like we vacation all year round on our own.”
“How can you say that?” Morgan asked. “What about my hardware store?”
She didn’t answer.
“We’re city people,” Morgan said. “We have our city patterns, things to keep us busy … It’s dangerous, lolling around like this. It’s never good just to loll around and think. Why, you and Father never vacationed in your lives. Did you?”
“I don’t recall,” she said.
She would not remember anything about his father, ever. Sometimes Morgan wondered if her failing memory for recent events might stem from her failing memory of her husband; selective forgetfulness was an impossibility, maybe. Having chosen to forget in one area, she had to forget in all others as well. He felt a sudden urge to jolt her. He wanted to ask: am I aging in the same direction my father did? have I journeyed too far from him? am I too near? what do I have to go on, here? I’m traveling blind; I’m older now than my own father ever lived to be. Instead, he asked, “Didn’t you and he go to Ocean City once?”
“I really wouldn’t know,” she said primly.
“Jesus! You’re so stubborn!” he shouted, slapping his thigh. His mother remained unmoved, but two girls walking ahead in bikinis looked over their shoulders at him. “Do you ever think how I must feel?” he asked his mother. “Sometimes I feel I’ve just been plunked here. I have no one from the old days; I’m just a foreigner on my own. You can’t count Brindle; she’s so much younger, and anyway so wrapped up in that husband of hers …”
“But there’s always me,” his mother said, picking her way around a toddler with a bucket.
“Yes,” he said, “but often you sort of … vacate, Mother; you’re not really there at all.”
He had hurt her feelings. He was glad of it only for an instant; then he felt deeply remorseful. His mother raised her head high and looked off toward someone’s A-frame cottage, where beach towels flapped on the balcony railing. “Why!” she said. “Wasn’t that speedy.”
“What was, Mother dear?”
“They’ve finished construction on the A-frame,” she said. “It seems like no time at all.” And she jutted her chin at him with a triumphant, bitter glare.
“So it does, dear heart,” he said.
3
Morgan went out to get a pizza for their supper and returned to find that Bonny’s brother had arrived. He’d brought his new wife, Priscilla, a pretty girl with short, straight blond hair caught back in a silver barrette. They had been married only a few weeks. They wore similar crisp, new-looking white slacks and pastel shirts, like honeymooners. Morgan hadn’t even met Priscilla up till now—or people seemed to assume he hadn’t, for Billy introduced her and she shook Morgan’s hand formally. Bonny said, “Priscilla went to Roland Park Country School with the Semple-Pearce girls, Morgan.”
“Oh, yes,” Morgan said, but the truth of the matter was, he could have sworn that Billy had been married to Priscilla once before. He seemed to remember her. He thought she might even have visited this cottage. But she acted as if everything were new to her. “What a sweet place,” she said. “What a lot of … character,” and she walked around the living room fingering the seashell ashtrays like a stranger, and peering at the photograph of Uncle Ollie’s 1934 lacrosse team, and reading all the titles on the Reader’s Digest book condensations. Morgan was cagy; he went along with it. Then as soon as possible he cornered Bonny, who had taken the pizza out to the kitchen.
“Bonny,” he whispered, “isn’t that girl an ex-wife of