Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [77]
“It’s Bob,” he said, panting.
“Beg pardon?”
“I’m Bob. You always call me Robert Roberts, like a joke.”
“I do?”
“I came for Brindle.”
Morgan turned to Brindle. She hugged her knees harder and rocked, staring out to sea.
“It’s the same thing all over, isn’t it?” Robert said to Morgan. “It’s the same old story. Once again she leaves me.”
“Ah, well … have a seat, Robert, Bob. Don’t be such a stranger.”
Robert ignored him. “Brindle,” he said, “I woke up Thursday morning and you were gone. I thought maybe you were just miffed about something, but it’s been four days now and you never came back. Brindle, are we going round and round like this all our lives? We’re together, you leave me, we’re together, you leave me?”
“You do still have my photograph,” Brindle told the ocean.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Brindle got to her feet. She brushed sand off the seat of her bathing suit; she adjusted a strap. Then she went up to Robert Roberts and set her face so close to his that he drew back. “Look,” she said, tapping her yellow cheekbone. “This is me. I am Brindle Gower Teague Roberts. All that string of names.”
“Yes, Brindle, of course,” Robert said.
“You say that so easily! But since you and I were children, I’ve been married and widowed. I married old Horace Teague next door and moved into his rowhouse; I bought little cans of ham in the gourmet sections of department stores—”
“You’ve told me all that, Brindle.”
“I am not the girl in the photograph.”
She was not. The skin below her eyes was the same damaged color as Morgan’s. The dimple in one cheek had become a dry crack—something Morgan had never noticed. She was thirty-eight years old. Morgan stroked his beard.
“Brindle, what is it you’re saying?” Robert Roberts asked. “Are you saying you don’t love me any more?”
In the little group of women (all gazing politely in other directions) there was the softest rustle, like a laugh or a sigh. Robert looked over at them. Then he turned to Morgan. “What is she saying?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Morgan.
Louisa said, “If they marry, I hope I won’t be sent to live with them.”
“They are married, Mother dear,” Morgan told her.
“You have no idea how hard it is,” Louisa said, “not knowing where you’ll be shipped to next.”
“Mother, have we ever shipped you anywhere? Ever in all your life?”
“Haven’t you?” she asked. She considered, retreating into the hood of her beach robe. “Well, somehow it feels like you have, at least,” she said. “No, I prefer to stay on with you. Bonny, you won’t let him send me off to Brindle’s, will you? Morgan’s difficult to live with but … eventful, I suppose you’d say.”
“Oh, yes,” said Bonny dryly.
“Promise?”
“Mother,” said Morgan. “They’re married. They’re already married, and no one’s shipped you anywhere. Tell her, Brindle. Tell her, Robert, Bob …”
But Robert faced the sea, not listening. His hair blew up stiffly, in spikes, which made him look desperate. While the others watched, he bent to dust the sand from his trousers. He pulled his shirtcuffs a proper length below the sleeves of his coat. Then he started walking toward the water.
He circled a child with a shovel and he stepped over a moat and a crenellated wall. But his powers of observation seemed to weaken as he drew nearer the sea, and he stumbled into a shallow basin that three little boys were digging. He climbed out again, ignoring their cries. Now his trouser legs were dark and sugary-looking. He accidentally crushed a paper cup beneath his heel. He reached the surf and kept going. A young man, lifting a screaming girl in the air and preparing to dunk her, suddenly set her down and stood gaping. Robert was knee-deep in seething white water. He was waist-deep. When the breakers curled back for a new assault, he was seen to be clothed in heavy, dragging vestments