Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [8]
“Do you have dimes?” the doctor shouted.
“Time for what?”
“Dimes! Money!”
“No, I’m sorry,” Leon said. “Could you use a dollar bill?”
“For you, I meant!” the doctor shouted. They passed through a set of swinging doors. He lowered his voice. “Not for me; for you. For the phone. You’ll want to call about the baby.”
“Who would I call?” Leon asked, spreading his arms.
The doctor stopped short. “Who would he call!” he repeated to himself. He wore the open, delighted expression he’d worn in the ambulance when he’d been told about the youth-bed rail.
Then a nurse lifted Emily’s sheet, clucked at the blood-soaked newspapers, and ran alongside the stretcher as it rolled down a corridor. Another nurse took Leon’s elbow and led him toward a typist in a glass compartment. Everything spun into action—polished, efficient, briskly clacketing. The doctor was left behind.
In fact, he was forgotten, for the moment. When Leon and Emily next thought of him, he was nowhere to be found. He’d just melted away. Had he left any word? Leon asked Emily’s nurse. The nurse had no idea whom he was talking about. Another doctor had been called in, a resident in obstetrics. He said it was a fine delivery, healthy baby. All things considered, he said, Emily should be thankful. “Yes, and Dr. Morgan is the one we should thank,” Leon told him. “Besides, we hadn’t settled the fee.” But the resident had never heard of Dr. Morgan. And he wasn’t in the phone book, either. It seemed he didn’t exist.
Later on (just a few weeks later, when their daughter’s birth had faded and they felt she had always been with them), they almost wondered if they had imagined the man—just conjured him up in a time of need. His hat, Emily said, had made her think of a gnome. He really could have been someone from a fairytale, she said: the baby elf, the troll, the goblin who finds children under cabbage leaves and lays them in their mothers’ arms and disappears.
1968
1
You could say he was a man who had gone to pieces, or maybe he’d always been in pieces; maybe he’d arrived unassembled. Various parts of him seemed poorly joined together. His lean, hairy limbs were connected by exaggerated knobs of bone; his black-bearded jaw was as clumsily hinged as a nutcracker. Parts of his life, too, lay separate from other parts. His wife knew almost none of his friends. His children had never seen where he worked; it wasn’t in a safe part of town, their mother said. Last month’s hobby—the restringing of a damaged pawnshop banjo, with an eye to becoming suddenly musical at the age of forty-two—bore no resemblance to this month’s hobby, which was the writing of a science-fiction novel that would make him rich and famous. He was writing about the death of Earth. All these recent flying saucers, he proposed, belonged to beings who knew for a fact that our sun would burn out within a year and a half. They weren’t just buzzing Earth for the hell of it; they were ascertaining what equipment would be needed to transfer us all to another planet in a stabler, far more orderly solar system. He had written chapter one, but was having trouble with the opening sentence of chapter two.
Or look at his house: a tall brick Colonial house in north Baltimore. Even this early on a January morning, when the sun was no more than a pinkish tinge in an opaque white sky, it was clear there was something fragmented about Morgan’s house. Its marble stoop was worn soft at the edges like an old bar of soap, and heavy lace curtains glimmered in the downstairs windows; but on the second floor, where his daughters slept, the curtains were made from sections of the American flag, and on the third floor, where his mother slept, they were lace again, misting the tangle of ferns that hung behind them. And if you could see inside, through the slowly thinning gray of the hallway, you would find the particles of related people’s unrelated worlds: his daughters’ booksacks tumbling across the hall radiator, which also served as mail rack, sweater shelf,