Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [97]
“They stop this fat old lady,” he was saying. “A mess! A disaster. Gray and puffy like some failed pastry, and layers of clothes that seem to have melted together. ‘Can you sing “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over”?’ they ask, and she says, ‘Certainly,’ and starts right up, so obliging, with this shiny grin, and ends with her arms spread and this little stamp-stamp finish—”
He bit down on his cigarette and stopped his pacing long enough to demonstrate—both hands outflung, one foot poised to stamp. “Just … because … it’s JUNE!” he sang, and he stamped his foot.
“I love you too,” she told him.
“JUNE!” he sang.
He paused. He took the cigarette from his mouth.
“Eh?” he said.
She smiled up at him.
He tugged his beard. He shot her a sidelong glance from under his eyebrows, and then he dropped his cigarette and slowly, meditatively ground it out with his heel. When he sat on the edge of the couch, he still seemed to be thinking something over. When he bent to kiss her, he gave off a kind of shaggy warmth, like some furred animal, and he smelled of ashes and Mentholatum.
1977
1
Morgan’s daughter Liz finally, finally had her baby, on the coldest night in the coldest February anyone could remember. It was Morgan who had to get up and drive her to the hospital. Then of course her husband, Chester, arrived from Tennessee, and when Liz was released from the hospital, she and Chester and the baby stayed on in her old room a few days till Liz was strong enough to travel. Meanwhile the house filled further, like something flooding upward from the basement. Amy and Jean kept stopping by with their children, and the twins drifted in from Charlottesville, and Molly and her family from New York, and by the time Kate arrived with her boyfriend, there was nowhere to put the boyfriend but the storeroom on the third floor, underneath the eaves. This was a weekend. They’d be gone by Monday, Morgan reminded himself. He loved them all, he was crazy about them, but life was becoming a little difficult. The daughters who hadn’t got along in the past didn’t get along any better now. The new baby appeared to be the colicky type. And there was never any time to see Emily.
“If we feed the children in the kitchen,” Bonny said, counting on her fingers, “that makes sixteen grownups in the dining room, or fifteen if Lizzie wants a tray in bed, but then the mothers would have to keep running out to check on them, so maybe we should feed the children early. But then the children would be tearing around like wild things while we were trying to eat, and I just remembered, Liz said her old college roommate was coming at seven-thirty, so we can’t eat too late, or maybe she meant she was coming for supper; do you think so? and in that case we’d be seventeen at table, assuming Liz does not want a tray in bed, and naturally she wouldn’t if her roommate’s eating downstairs, but we only have service for sixteen; so we’ll have to divide it up, say you and me and Brindle and your mother in the first shift and then the girls and their husbands and … oh, dear, David is Jewish, I think. Is it all right I’m serving ham?”
“Who’s David?” Morgan asked.
“Katie’s boyfriend, Morgan. Pay attention. This is really very simple.”
Then after supper one of the grandsons either broke a toe or didn’t break a toe, no one could be sure, though everyone agreed that broken toes required no splints anyhow, so there wasn’t much point in troubling a doctor outside office hours. Actually, Morgan would not have minded driving the boy to the hospital, which by now he could have found in his sleep. He needed air. The living room was a sea of bodies—people reading, knitting, wrestling, quarreling, playing board games, poking the fire, lolling around, yawning, discussing politics. The shades had not been drawn, and the darkness pressing in made the house seem even murkier. Louisa’s black Labrador, Harry, had chewed