Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [87]
“And you’ll want to go through her things, surely—so many of her nice things that I know she would want you to keep,” Claire said.
“I don’t have room in the car,” said Emily. But suddenly she felt she would like this whole house—the wallpaper patterned with wasp-waisted baskets of flowers, the carpet always rubbed the wrong way, the china high-heeled slipper filled with chalky china roses. She imagined moving in. She pictured resuming her life where she’d left off, drinking her morning cocoa from the celery-green glass mug she’d found in a cereal box when she was eight. And when Claire said, “But her jade bar pin, Emily, that wouldn’t need any space,” she instantly pictured the bar pin, streaked with a kind of wood grain and twined at one end with blackened gold leaves. She was amazed at how much was still lodged in her mind. Like the Shufords, the Grindstaffs, and the Haithcocks, Aunt Mercer’s house lived on in Emily, every warped shingle and small-paned window, whether she took it out to examine it or not. She would let the bar pin go to Aunt Junie, who wore such things, but in a sense she would continue owning it forever, and she might catch an accidental glimpse of it, barely noticed, some moment while waking or falling asleep fifty years from now.
“I don’t have room even for that,” she said.
Then she spread her hands and looked down at them—the parched white backs of them, the gold wedding ring as thin as wire.
At four o’clock they got to their feet and prepared to walk over to the Meetinghouse. Everyone seemed to have a great many coats and scarves, although it was a warm day. They helped each other, like handicapped people. Claire smoothed Claude’s collar for him and straightened his lapels. “Don’t you have a wrap, dear?”
Aunt Junie asked Emily. “Your … what is that … skirt and top; it’s so thin. Won’t you borrow a sweater? You don’t want to take a chill.” But Emily shook her head.
Walking up Erin Street, they did meet a few young people, wearing boot-cut jeans and those velvet blazers that were popular in Baltimore too. This town was not so isolated as Emily had imagined. But the Meetinghouse—the only Friends Meeting in Taney County-was as small and poor as ever, a gray frame cubicle huddled in the back yard of the Savior Baptist Church; and everyone approaching it was old. They mumbled and clung to each other’s arms, climbing the front steps. Emily hoped to see the friends she’d gone to First Day School with—never more than three or four of them in the best of times—but they must have moved away. There was no one under fifty. She took her seat on a straight-backed bench, between Aunt Junie and Claude. She looked around the little room and counted fourteen people. The fifteenth entered and closed the door behind him. A hush fell like the hush on a boat when the engine is cut off and the sails are raised.
In this quiet Emily had grown up—not a total silence but a ticking, breathing quiet, with the occasional sound of cloth rubbing cloth, little stirrings, throats cleared, people rustling coughdrop packets or fumbling through their purses. She expected nothing from it. (She had never been religious.) She wondered, for the hundredth time, what that dusty red glass was on the ledge above the east window. It was nearly overflowing with something that looked like wax. Maybe it was a candle. She always came to that conclusion. (But first she thought of something brewing—a culture, yogurt, dough, something concocting itself out of nothing.) She tried to name all the states in the Union. There were four beginning with A, two with C … but the M’s were hard; there were so many: Montana, Missouri, Mississippi …
An old man with cottony hair rose and stood leaning on his cane. “Mercer Dulaney,” he said, “once walked two and one-half miles in rheumatism weather to feed my dogs while I was off visiting my sister in Fairfax County. I reckon now I’ll take that cat of hers and tend it, if it don’t get on too bad with my dogs.”
He sat down, groped for a handkerchief, and wiped his lips.