by Anne Tyler
Ruin echoed off the high, sculptured ceiling. Bonny brought the cookies from the sideboard; the girls took two and three apiece as the plate went past. Morgan let his chair tip suddenly forward. He studied Brindle with a curious, alert expression on his face, but she didn’t seem to notice.
6
Now he and Bonny were returning from a movie. They slogged down the glassy black pavement toward the bus stop. It was a misty, damp night, warmer than it had been all day. Neon signs blurred into rainbows, and the taillights of cars, sliding off into the fog, seemed to contract and then vanish. Bonny had her arm linked through Morgan’s. She wore a wrinkled raincoat she had owned since he first met her, and crepe-soled shoes that made a luff-luffing sound. “Maybe tomorrow,” she said, “you could get the car put back together.”
“Yes, maybe,” said Morgan absently.
“We’ve been riding buses all week.”
Morgan was thinking about the movie. It hadn’t seemed very believable to him. Everyone had been so sure of what everyone else was going to do. The hero, who was some kind of double agent, had laid all these elaborate plans that depended on some other, unknowing person appearing in a certain place or making a certain decision, and the other person always obliged. Sentries looked away at crucial moments. High officials went to dinner just when they usually went to dinner. Didn’t B ever happen instead of A, in these people’s lives? Morgan plodded steadily, frowning at his feet. From out of nowhere the memory came to him of the hero’s manicured, well-tended hands expertly assembling a rifle from random parts smuggled through in a leather briefcase.
They reached the bus stop; they halted and peered down the street. “Watch it take all night,” Bonny said good-naturedly. She removed her pleated plastic rain-scarf and shook the droplets from it.
“Bonny,” Morgan said, “why don’t I own a corduroy jacket?”
“You do,” she told him.
“I do?”
“You have that black one with the suede lapels.”
“Oh, that,” he said.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“I’d prefer to have rust,” he said.
She looked over at him. She seemed about to speak, but then she must have changed her mind.
A bus lumbered into view, its windows lit with golden lights—an entire civilization, Morgan imagined, cruising through space. It stopped with a wheeze and let them climb on. For such a late hour, it seemed unusually crowded. There were no double seats left. Bonny settled beside a woman in a nurse’s uniform, and instead of finding someplace else Morgan stood rocking above her in the aisle. “I’d like a nice rust jacket with the elbows worn,” he told her.
“Well,” she said dryly, “you’d have to wear down your own elbows, I expect.”
“I don’t know; I might find something in a secondhand store.”
“Morgan, can’t you stay out of secondhand stores? Some of those people have died, the owners of those things you buy.”
“That’s no reason to let a perfectly good piece of clothing go to waste.”
Bonny wiped the rain off her face with a balled-up Kleenex from her pocket.
“Also,” Morgan said, “I’d like a pair of khaki trousers and a really old, soft, clean white shirt.”
She replaced the Kleenex in her pocket. She jolted along with the bus in silence for a moment, looking straight ahead of her. Then she said, “Who is it this time?”
“Who is what?”
“Who is it that wears those clothes?”
“No one!” he said. “What do you mean?”
“You think I’m blind? You think I haven’t been through this a hundred times before?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Bonny shrugged and turned her gaze out the window.
They were near their own neighborhood now. Lamps glowed over the entranceways of brick houses and apartment buildings. A man in a hat was walking his beagle. A boy cupped a match and lit a girl’s cigarette. In the seat behind Bonny, two women in fur coats were having a conversation. “I guess you heard the news by now,” one of them told the other. “Angle’s husband died.”
“Died?” asked the other.
“Just up and died.”
“How’d it happen?”
“Well, he finished shaving and he put on a little aftershave and he came back into the bedroom and went to sit on the bed—”
“But what was it? His heart?”
“Well, I’m telling you, Libby …”
Morgan began to have an uncomfortable thought. He became convinced that his hand, which gripped the seat in plain view of these two women, was so repulsive to them that they were babbling utter nonsense just to keep from thinking about it. He imagined that he could see through their eyes; he saw exactly how his hand appeared to them—its knuckly fingers, wiry black hairs, sawdust ingrained around the nails. He saw his whole person, in fact. What a toad he was! A hat and a beard, on legs. His eyes felt huge and hot and heavy, set in a baroque arrangement of dark pouches. “He reached for his socks,” the first woman said desperately, “and commenced to unroll them. One sock was rolled inside the other, don’t you know …” She was looking away from Morgan; she was avoiding the sight of his hand. He let go of the seat and buried both fists in his armpits. For the rest of the trip he rode unsupported, lurching violently whenever the bus stopped.
And when they reached home, where the girls were doing their lessons on the dining-room table and Brindle was laying out her Tarot cards in the kitchen, Morgan went straight up the stairs to bed. “I thought you’d like some coffee,” Bonny said. She called after him, “Morgan? Don’t you want a cup of coffee?”
“No, I guess not tonight,” he said. “Thank you, dear,” and he continued up the stairs. He went to his room, undressed to his thermal underwear, and lit a cigarette from the pack on the bureau. For the first time all day, he was bare-headed. In the mirror his forehead looked lined and vulnerable. He noticed a strand of white in his beard. White hair! “Christ,” he said. Then he bent forward and looked more closely. Maybe, he thought, he could pass himself off as one of those miracles from the Soviet Union—a hundred and ten, hundred and twenty, still scaling mountains with his herd of goats. He brightened. He could cross the country on a lecture tour. At every whistle stop he’d take off his shirt and show his black-pelted chest. Reporters would ask him his secret. “Yogurt und cigarettes, comrades,” he cackled to the mirror. He took a couple of prancing steps, showing off. “Never anodder sing but yogurt und Rossian cigarettes.”
Feeling more cheerful, he went to the closet for his cardboard file box, which he placed on the bed. He drew intently on his Camel as he padded around, getting arranged: turning on the electric blanket, propping up his pillow, finding an ashtray. He climbed into bed and set the ashtray in his lap. There was a little coughing fit to be seen through first. He scattered ashes down his undershirt. He pinched a speck of tobacco from his tongue. “Ah, comrades,” he wheezed. He opened the file box, took out the first sheet of paper, and settled back to read it.
1. Familiarize yourself with all steps before beginning.
2. Have on hand the following: pliers, Phillips screwdriver …
He lowered the sheet of paper and gazed at the black windowpanes. Miles away from here, he imagined, the windows on Crosswell Street were blinking out, first the left one, then the right one. The baby would stir in her sleep. Leon’s hand would drop from the light switch and he would cross the cold floor to their pallet. Then all daytime sounds would stop; there would only be the sifting breaths of sleepers, motionless and dreamless on their threadbare sheets.
Morgan turned his light off too, and settled down for the night.
1969
1
What was it that he wanted of them? He was everywhere, it seemed—an oddly shaped, persistent shadow trailing far behind when they went for a walk, lurking in various doorways, flattening himself around the corner of a building. What they ought to do wa
s simply wheel and confront him. “Why, Dr. Morgan!”—smiling, surprised—“How nice to run into you!” But the situation hadn’t lent itself to that, somehow. The first time they’d seen him (or felt his presence, really), back when Gina was a baby, they hadn’t realized who he was. Coming home from a shopping trip at twilight, they’d been chilled by a kind of liquid darkness flowing in and out of alleyways behind them. Emily had been frightened. Leon had been angry, but with Emily next to him and Gina in his arms he hadn’t wanted to force anything. They had merely walked a little faster, and spoken to each other in a loud, casual tone without once mentioning what was happening. The second time, Emily had been alone. She’d left the baby with Leon and gone to buy felt for the puppets. Directly opposite their apartment building, in an arched granite doorway, a figure fell suddenly backward into the gloom of the Laundromat. She hardly saw; she was calculating the yardage she would need. But that evening, as she was making a pointed hat for Rumpelstiltskin, the memory came swimming in again. She saw the figure fall once more out of sight—though he hadn’t been wearing a pointed hat at all but something flat, a beret, perhaps. Still, where had she seen him before? She said, “Oh!” and laid her scissors down. “Guess who I think I saw today?” she said to Leon. “That doctor. That Dr. Morgan.”
“Did you ask him why he never sent a bill?”
“No, he wasn’t really … It wasn’t a meeting, exactly. I mean, he didn’t see me. Well, he saw me, but it seemed he … Probably,” she said, “it wasn’t Dr. Morgan at all. I’m sure he would have spoken.”
A month or so later he followed her along Beacon Avenue. She stopped to look in the window of an infants’-wear shop and she felt someone else stop too. She turned and found a man some distance away, his back to her, gazing off down the street at nothing in particular. He might have stepped out of a jungle movie, she thought, with his safari shirt and shorts, his knee-high socks, ankle boots, and huge pith helmet. Extraneous buckles and D-rings glittered all over him—on his shoulders, his sleeves, his rear pockets. It was nobody dangerous. It was only one of those eccentric people you often see on city streets, acting out some elaborate inner vision of themselves. She walked on. At the next red light she glanced back again and here he came, hurrying toward her with a swaggering, soldierly gait to match the uniform, his eyes obscured by the helmet but his abundant beard in full view. Oh, you couldn’t mistake that beard. Dr. Morgan! She took a step toward him. He looked up at her, clapped a hand on his helmet, and darted through a door reading LURAE’S FINE COIFFURES.
Emily felt absurd. She felt how open and glad she must look, preparing to call his name. But what had she done wrong? Why didn’t he like her any more? He had seemed so taken with the two of them, back when Gina was born.
She didn’t tell Leon. It would make him angry, maybe; you never knew. She decided that, anyhow, it had only been one of those unexplainable things-meaningless, not worth troubling Leon about.
So it got off on the wrong foot, you might say. There was a moment when they could have dealt with it straightforwardly, but the moment slipped past them. After several of these incidents (spaced across weeks or even months) in which one thing or another prevented them from going up to the man and greeting him naturally, it began to seem that the situation had taken a turn of its own. There was no way they could gracefully set it right now. It became apparent that he must be crazy—or, at least, obsessed in some unaccountable way. (Emily shivered to think of Gina’s delivery at his hands.) Yet, as Leon pointed out, he did no harm. He never threatened them or even came within speaking distance of them; there was nothing to complain of. Really, Emily was taking this too fancifully, Leon said. The man was only something to be adjusted to, as a matter of course. He was part of the furniture of their lives, like the rowhouses looming down Crosswell Street, the dusty, spindly trees dying of exhaust fumes, and the puppets hanging in their muslin shrouds from the hooks in the back-bedroom closet.
2
Now that it was winter, business had slacked off. There had been a little burst around Christmas (holiday bazaars, parties for rich people’s children), but none of the open-air fairs and circuses that kept them so busy in the summer. Emily used the time to build a new stage—a wooden one, hinged and folded for portability. She repaired the puppets and sewed more costumes for them. A few she replaced completely, which led to the usual question of what to do with the old ones. They were like dead bodies; you couldn’t just dump them in the trashcan. “Use them for spare parts,” Leon always said. “Save the eyes. Save that good nose.” Put Red Riding Hood’s grandmother’s pockmarked cork-ball nose on any other puppet? It wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t be right. Anyway, how could she tear that face apart? She laid the grandmother in a carton alongside a worn-out Beauty from “Beauty and the Beast”—the very first puppet she’d ever made. They were on their third Beauty at the moment, a much more sophisticated version with a seamed cloth face. It wasn’t the plays that wore the puppets out; it was the children coming up afterward, patting the puppets’ wigs and stroking their cheeks. Beauty’s skin was gray with fingerprints. Her yellow hair had a tattered, frantic look.
This whole room belonged to the puppets: the hollow back bedroom, with peeling silvery pipes shooting to the ceiling and a yellow rain stain ballooning down one wall. The window was painted shut, its panes so sooty that the sun set up an opaque white film in the afternoons. The wooden floor put splinters in Gina’s knees and turned her overalls black. The china doorknob was hazy with cracks. The door hung crooked. Nights, when Emily worked late in the glow of one goose-necked lamp, the hall light that shone beneath the door was not a rod but a wedge, like a very long piece of pie.
She sat up late and repaired the witch, the all-purpose stepmother-witch that was used in so many different plays. No wonder she kept wearing out! One black button eye dangled precariously. Emily perched upon the stepladder that was the room’s only furniture and tied a knot in a long tail of thread.
The puppets most in use were kept in an Almadén chablis box in the corner. They poked their heads out of the cardboard compartments: two young girls (one blonde, one brunette), a prince, a green felt frog, a dwarf. The others stayed in muslin bags in the closet, with name tags attached to the drawstrings: Rip Van W. Fool. Horse. King. She liked to change them around from time to time, assign them roles they were not accustomed to. Rip Van Winkle, minus his removable beard, made a fine Third Son in any of those stories where the foolish, kind-hearted Third Son ends up with the princess and half the kingdom. He fitted right in. Only Emily knew he didn’t belong, and it gave a kind of edge to his performance, she felt. She ran him through his lines herself. (Leon played the older two sons.) She put an extra, salty twang in his voice. The real Third Son, meanwhile—more handsome, with less character—lay face-up backstage, grinning vacantly.
Emily had never actually planned to be a puppeteer, and even now both she and Leon thought of it as temporary work. She had entered college as a mathematics major, on full scholarship—the only girl her age in Taney, Virginia, who was not either getting married the day after graduation or taking a job at Taney Paper Products. Her father had been killed in an auto accident when Emily was a baby; then, early in Emily’s freshman year at college, her mother died of a heart ailment. She was going to have to manage on her own, therefore. She hoped to teach junior high. She liked the cool and systematic process that would turn a tangle of disarranged numbers into a single number at the end—the redistributing and simplifying of equations that was the basis of junior-high-school mathematics. But she hadn’t even finished the fall semester when she met Leon, who was a junior involved in acting. He couldn’t major in acting (it wasn’t offered), so he was majoring in English, and barely scraping by in all his subjects while he appeared in every play on campus. For the first time Emily understood why they called actors “stars.” There really was something dazzling about him whenever he walked onstage. Seen close up, he was a stringy, long-faced, gloomy boy with eyes that dr
ooped at the outer corners and a mouth already beginning to be parenthesized by two crescent-shaped lines. He had a bitter look that made people uneasy. But onstage, all this came across as a sort of power and intensity. He was so concentrated. His characters were so sharply focused that all the others seemed wooden by comparison. His voice (in real life a bit low and glum) seemed to penetrate farther than the other voices. He hung on to words lovingly and rolled them out after the briefest pause, as if teasing the audience. It appeared that his lines were invented, not memorized.
Emily thought he was wonderful. She had never met anyone like him. Her own family had been so ordinary and pale; her childhood had been so unexceptional. (His had been terrible.) They began spending all their time together—nursing a single Pepsi through an afternoon in the canteen, studying in the library with their feet intertwined beneath the table. Emily was too shy to appear in any plays with him, but she was good with her hands and she signed on as a set-builder. She hammered platforms and stairsteps and balconies. She painted leafy woods on canvas flats, and then for the next play she transformed the woods into flowered wallpaper and mahogany-colored wainscoting. Meanwhile, it seemed that even this slim connection with the theatre was making her life more dramatic. There were scenes with his parents, at which she was an embarrassed observer—long tirades from his father, a Richmond banker, while his mother wiped her eyes and smiled politely into space. Evidently, the university had informed them that Leon’s grades were even lower than usual. If they didn’t improve, he was going to flunk out. Almost every Sunday his parents would drive all the way from Richmond just to sit in Leon’s overstuffed, faded dormitory parlor asking what kind of profession he could hope for with a high F average. Emily would rather have skipped these meetings, but Leon wanted her there. At first his parents were cordial to her. Then they grew less friendly. It couldn’t have been anything she’d done. Maybe it was what she hadn’t done. She was always reserved and quiet with them. She came from old Quaker stock and tended, she’d been told, to feel a little too comfortable in the face of long silences. Sometimes she thought things were going beautifully when in fact everybody else was casting about in desperation for something to talk about. So she tried harder to be sociable. She wore lipstick and stockings when she knew they were coming, and she thought up neutral subjects ahead of time. While Leon and his father were storming at each other, she’d be running through a mental card file searching for a topic to divert them. “Our class is reading Tolstoy now,” she told Leon’s mother one Sunday in April. “Do you like Tolstoy?”