Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [89]
“I suppose we’ll have to sell this place,” Aunt Junie said, moving laboriously along the sidewalk. “There isn’t much point in keeping up two houses now.”
“But where will you live, Aunt Junie?”
“Oh, I’d move in with Claire and Claude,” she said.
Emily thought of something dark, like an eye, contracting and getting darker. There once had been three houses, long ago when Emily’s father was still alive.
Aunt Junie shuffled ahead of Emily through the front door. A lamp glowed in the hall, casting a circle of yellow light. “You ought to pick out what you want here,” Aunt Junie said. “Why, some of it’s antiques. Pick out what you’d like to take home.”
She leaned on Emily’s arm, and they made their way to the living room. Emily turned a light on. Furniture sprang into view, each piece with its sharp shadow—a drop-leaf table with its rear leaf raised against the wall; a wing chair; a desk with slender, curved legs that used to remind Emily of a skinny lady in high-heeled shoes. She could have taken all of this, heaven knows. Offered, in general terms, a desk or a sofa, she would have said, “Oh, thank you. Our apartment does seem bare.” A little itch of greed might have started up, in fact. But when she stood in this room and saw the actual objects, she didn’t want them. They were too solid, too thickly coated by past events, maybe; she couldn’t explain it. She said, “Aunt Junie, sell it. You could surely find some use for the money.”
“Take something small, at least,” Aunt Junie said. “Emily, honey, you’re our only young person. You and your little daughter: you’re all we’ve got to pass things on to.”
Emily pictured Gina reading in the wing chair, twining a curl at her temple the way she always did when she was absorbed. (Was she in bed yet? Had she brushed her teeth? Did Leon know she still liked a nightlight, even if she wouldn’t say so?) She missed Gina’s watchful eyes and her delicate, colorless, chipped-looking mouth—Aunt Mercer’s mouth. Emily had never realized. She stopped dead, struck by the thought.
Meanwhile, Aunt Junie traveled around the room, holding her crippled arm with her good hand. “This china slipper, maybe. Or these little brass monkeys: hear no evil, see no evil …”
“Aunt Junie, really, we don’t lead that kind of life,” Emily told her.
“What kind of life? What kind of life must it take just to put a few brass monkeys on your coffee table?”
“We don’t have a coffee table,” Emily said, smiling.
“Take Mercer’s, then.”
“No. Please.”
“Or jewelry, a watch, a brooch. Pin her bar pin on your collar.”
“I don’t have a collar, either,” Emily said. “I only wear these leotards, and they’re made of something knit; they can’t be pinned.”
Aunt Junie turned and looked at her. She said, “Oh, Emily, your mother sent you off so nice. She read up in Mademoiselle and made you all those clothes for college. She was worried you’d be dressed wrong. No one else in your class went away to school, none of those Baptists, those Haithcocks and Biddixes. She wanted you to go off nice and show them all, come back educated, settle down, marry someone good to you like my Claire did; see my Claire? And she fixed you that sweet paisley dress with the little white collar and cuffs. Now, that you could pin a brooch on. She said you could wear it to Meeting. You said, ‘Mama, I do not intend to go to Meeting there and all I want is blue jeans. I’m getting out,’ you said, ‘I’m going to join, get to be part of some big group, not going to be different ever again.’ What a funny little thing you were! But of course she paid you no mind, and rightly so, as you can see; quite rightly so. Now, I don’t know what you call this: leotard? Is that it? Well, I’m sure it’s all very stylish in Baltimore, but Emily, honey, it can’t hold a candle to that paisley dress your mother made.”
“That paisley dress is gone,” Emily said. “It’s twelve years old. It’s cleaning windows now.”
Aunt Junie turned her face away. She looked stony and blind with hurt. She groped through the furniture-chair,