Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [75]
Meanwhile the weekend dragged on.
Kate had disgraced the family, Bonny said. Now she was on the police files, marked for life. Bonny seemed to take this very seriously. (Her sunburn gave her a hectic, intense look.) Because the cottage had no telephone, the Ocean City police had had to call the Bethany police and have them notify the Gowers. Naturally, therefore, the news would be everywhere now. Saturday, at breakfast, Bonny laid a blazing hand on Louisa’s arm and asked Kate, “How do you think your grandma feels? Her late husband’s name, which up till now has been unbesmirched.” Morgan had never heard her use the word “unbesmirched” before, and he wasn’t even sure that it existed. He took some time thinking it over. Louisa, meanwhile, went on calmly spooning grapefruit. “What do you say, Mother?” Bonny asked her.
Louisa peered out of her sunken eyes and said, “Well, I don’t know what all the fuss is about. We used to give little babies marijuana any old time. It soothed their teething.”
“No, no, Mother, that was belladonna,” Bonny said.
Kate merely looked bored. Brindle blew her nose. The Merediths sat in a row and watched, like members of a jury.
And on the beach—where the ocean curled and flattened beneath a deep blue bowl of sky, and gulls floated overhead as slow as sails—this group was a motley scramble of blankets, thermoses, sandy towels, an umbrella that bared half its spokes every time the wind flapped past, a squawking radio, and scattered leaves of newspaper. Kate, who had been grounded for the rest of her vacation, flipped angrily through Seventeen. Bonny sweated and shivered in layers of protective garments. The white zinc oxide on her nose and lower lip, along with her huge black sunglasses, gave her the look of some insect creature from a science-fiction movie. Gina dug a hole in the sand and climbed into it. Billy and Priscilla made a spectacle of themselves, lying too close together on their blanket.
And Emily, in an unbecoming pale blue swimsuit that exposed her thin, limp legs, took pictures that were going to turn out poorly, but she would not yield her camera to Morgan. She worried that he would snap her, she said. Morgan swore he wouldn’t. (She was already pasted in his mind as he would like her to be forever-wearing her liquid black skirt and ballet slippers. He would surely not choose to record this other self she had become.) “All I want to do,” he told her, “is photograph some groups. Some action, don’t you see.” He couldn’t bear her finicky delays, the stylized poses she insisted on. Morgan himself was a photographer of great speed and dash; he caught people in clumps, in mid-motion, mid-laugh. Emily picked her way across the sand to one person at a time, stopping every step or so to shake her white feet fastidiously, and then she would take an eternity getting things just right, squinting through the camera, squinting at the sky—as if there were anything that could be done, any adjustments at all to aid a Kodak Instamatic. “Be still, now,” she would tell her subject, but then she’d wait so long that whoever it was grew strained and artificial-looking, and more than once Morgan cried, “Just take it, dammit!