If Morning Ever Comes

by Anne Tyler

  “Well, not exactly,” Ben Joe said.

  “No, I mean it, now. Do you?”

  “No,” said Ben Joe. “I can’t believe history’s going anywhere at all, much less repeating itself.”

  Gary lit a slightly bent Chesterfield that he had pulled from his shirt pocket. He was enjoying himself now—as wrapped up in his story as if he were watching it unfold right there on the kitchen ceiling, he never even looked at Ben Joe.

  “Course she meant you-all’s history,” he said, “which is so confusing I never have got it straight and don’t intend to. Hardly worth it at this late date. But whatever it was, it’s got no bearing on us and Joanne’s house wasn’t a cold one, no. But Joanne, she gets i-deas. And up and left one day. Well, I don’t know why. But here I am, come to get her. I always say,” he said, looking suddenly at Ben Joe, “no sense acting like you don’t miss a person if you do. Never get ’em back pretending you wouldn’t have them if they crawled.”

  “I hope you do,” Ben Joe said suddenly. “Get her back, I mean.”

  “Thank you, sir. Thank you. It’s a right nice house you have here. You born in this house?”

  “Yes.”

  “I figured so. I always have wanted to come visit you all. Joanne, she sometimes talks about this place when she’s rested and just sort of letting her mind drift. Tells about all the things that go on here just in one day. It’s right fascinating to listen to. Tells about your daddy, and how his one aim in life was to go to Nashville, Tennessee, and watch real country-music singers, the way some people want to go to Paris, only he never did get there—”

  “I’d forgotten that,” Ben Joe said.

  “Oh, Joanne didn’t. She was full of things. I know about the time when your mamma and daddy were just married, and he bet her that she’d drop out first on a fifteen-mile hike to, to …

  “Burniston,” said Ben Joe.

  “Burniston, that’s it. Only neither one of them dropped out, they both made it, but what really got your daddy peeved was that the whole town of Sandhill followed them for curiosity’s sake, and none of them dropped out, either … O, ho …” He threw his head back, with his mouth wide and smiling for pure joy, so that Ben Joe had to smile back at him. “And how you are the only boy in Sandhill that they made a special town law for, forbidding you to whistle in the residential sections because it was so awful-sounding. And Susannah’s cracker sandwiches, made with two pieces of bread and then a cracker in between—”

  “Joanne told you all that?”

  “She did.”

  Ben Joe was quiet for a minute. For the first time he actually pictured Joanne married, telling a person what she had noticed in a lifetime and giving someone bits of her mind that none of them had even known she had. What bits, he wondered, would he give Shelley (if there were any to give)? And how did one go about it? Would he just lie back and say what came into his mind the minute it came, removing that filter that was always there and that strained the useless thoughts and the secret thoughts from being made known? But how could that be any gift to her? He frowned, and marked the tablecloth over and over with his thumbnail.

  “I’ll do the dishes,” Gary said.

  There were some things Ben Joe didn’t want to tell; he didn’t care if she was his wife. He wouldn’t want to tell all about his family, for instance, the way Joanne had done. Or about the little aimless curled-in-on-themselves things he was always wondering, like if you were an ant, how big would the rust on a frying pan look and could you actually see the molecules going around; and why was it that a sunlit train going through a tunnel did not retain the sunlight for a minute, the way the world did just at twilight, so that it was a little trainful of sunshine speeding through the dark like a lit up aquarium—useless things that a child might think and that Ben Joe had never seemed to grow out of. What would Shelley say to him if she knew all that?

  “Did you hear me?” Gary said. “I said, I’ll do the dishes.”

  Ben Joe pulled his thoughts together. “No,” he said, “Gram gets mad if we do them. She says that the only thinking time she has is when she’s doing the dishes.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, then …”

  For the first time that Ben Joe knew of, someone managed to interrupt Gary. It was Gram, bellowing from somewhere near the front of the house:

  “Soft as the voices of a-angels …”

  “What on earth,” Gary said.

  He scraped his chair back and stood up to head for the sound, with Ben Joe trailing aimlessly after him. They found Gram in the den, standing in the middle of the floor with her head thrown back and her arms spread like a scarecrow’s, roaring at the top of her lungs:

  “Whispering ho-o-ope

  Da da da da da …”

  In front of her, Carol sat in her rocking chair and rocked like mad. Her little feet stuck out in front of her; her head was ducked so that she could throw her weight forward.

  “You’re not listening,” Gram told her. She dropped her arms and beamed at Gary and Ben Joe. “I’m teaching her ‘Whispering Hope.’ ”

  “What for?” asked Ben Joe.

  “What for? Every little girl should know something like that. So she can stand up in a lacy little pinafore like the one she’s got on now—that’s what reminded me of it—and perform before refreshments are served on Sunday afternoons when callers come. All your sisters know how to do it. Joanne used to recite Longfellow’s ‘My Lost Youth’ and then Susannah would sing ‘Whispering—’ ”

  “I don’t remember that,” Ben Joe said.

  “Well, we never actually did it in front of guests. Your mother wouldn’t allow it. But we had our own private tea parties, sort of.”

  “Well, I’m leaving,” Ben Joe said.

  But behind him, as he left, Gary was saying, “That’s a great idea. Do you know ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’? I’d like—”

  Ben Joe climbed the stairs two at a time and crossed the hall to Joanne’s door.

  “Joanne?” he called.

  “Who is it? That you, Ben Joe?”

  “Yes. Can I come in?”

  “Sure, I guess so.”

  He opened the door. Joanne was at the door of her closet, looking at herself in the full-length mirror that hung there. She had on one of the gypsy-red dresses that she used to wear in high school and that had been left behind in her closet because it had faded at the seams. Faded or not, it was still a brighter shade of red than Ben Joe had been used to seeing lately. He blinked his eyes, and Joanne laughed and turned around to face him.

  “I found it hanging there,” she said. “I’d forgotten I had it. Do you remember when I used to wear this?”

  “Of course I do,” Ben Joe said. “You wore it up till the time you left home.”

  “I’d forgotten all about it.”

  She spun once more in front of the mirror and then stopped smiling and sat down abruptly on the bed with her shoulders sagging.

  “Did you want something?” she asked.

  “Well … no.”

  “Is Gary up?”

  “Yes.”

  He took his hands out of his pocket and crossed to sit in the platform rocker opposite her.

  “How do you like him?” she asked.

  “Oh, fine.”

  There seemed to be no words that would fill in the silence. He got up again and wandered aimlessly around the room. At the bureau he stopped and began looking through a silver catch-all tray under the mirror, full of odds and ends like rolled-up postage stamps and paper clips and pieces of lint.

  “Hey,” he said, “here’s my nail clippers.”

  “Take them.”

  “I can prove they’re mine. See this little license tag on the chain? I got it from a cereal company when I was about twelve. It has the year on it and the—”

  “Take it, for good
ness’ sakes.”

  She lit a Salem and threw the match in the direction of the window. With the nail clippers in his pocket Ben Joe wandered back to his seat, still with nothing to say.

  “I’ve been looking all over for them,” he said finally. “Also there’s a dent in the file part, where Jenny bit it when she was only—”

  “Ben Joe!”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said after a minute.

  “Well, what’d you say ‘Ben Joe’ for?”

  “No reason.”

  “It seems kind of funny,” he said, “just to scream ‘Ben Joe!’ at the top of your lungs as a way of making small talk. Why, I could think of a better topic than that if I—”

  “Are you trying to irritate me?”

  “Well, maybe so.” He examined his fingernails. “Yes,” he said after a minute, “I liked him fine. I did. Gary, I mean.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked up, saw that she was waiting for him to go on, and went back to frowning at his fingernails. “Came all the way here for you,” he said finally. “That’s something.”

  Joanne blew out an enormous cloud of smoke and nodded. She seemed still to be waiting for him to say more, but there was nothing else he could think of to say. When she saw that he was through speaking, she went over and sat down at her dressing table, still not speaking. She put her cigarette in the groove of a glass ash tray and began unpinning her knot of hair.

  “If I could just get organized,” she said. “I never have believed in going backwards instead of forwards.”

  Ben Joe looked up at her. He knew suddenly, without her telling him, what she had decided she was going to do about Gary. He could tell by her face, half happy and half embarrassed at having to announce that she was as reversible as anyone. He could almost read what she was thinking, and how she was trying to figure out the best way to say it gracefully.

  Her hair fell to her neck in a little puff. She put the bobby pins in a china coaster, and picked up a comb and began pulling it through her hair. The red dress made her different, Ben Joe thought. It turned her into exactly the same old Joanne, right down to the swinging hair that she tossed with a little teasing movement of her neck. And this could be any day seven years ago: Ben Joe in the chair watching her get ready to go out, funny old fussy Ben Joe telling her she really should start coming in earlier; and Joanne thin and quick and vaguely dissatisfied in front of her oval mirror. Any minute one of the children would come in (they were still called “the children” back then, not “the girls”) to watch, too. Going out was something exciting and mysterious then, something only Ben Joe and Joanne and Susannah were allowed to do; and the others always liked coming to watch the preparations. He felt suddenly sad, thinking about them—as if instead of merely growing up and still being right here they had died, and he was only now realizing it. He pictured all the children in a circle on the floor, newly bathed and ready for bed (it would have to be evening, then), all looking in the mirror to see the miraculous things Joanne did to her face. Joanne would be talking rapidly, teasing the children behind her and giving that saucy smile as she stared at her mascara in the glass—”Oh, it’s only old Kim Laurence I’m going out with. I think I’ll just stay home and let the baby go instead. You hear that, Tessie?” She would turn around and make a little face at Tessie, only three years old and already half asleep in the lap of a twin. “And won’t Kim Laurence be surprised when his date comes rolling toward him in a baby carriage?” Or: “I’ll tell you who I’m seeing tonight—it’s Quality Jones. Quality Jones, and he’s taking me to a New York night club and he’s such a fascinating conversationalist. All he says is, ‘What time is it, Joanne?’ and I say, ‘If morning ever comes, Quality, I’ll be happy to tell you.’ ”

  The image of the real Joanne, seven years older, glimmered in the mirror. Ben Joe bent his head and laid his index fingers across his eyelids, just lightly enough to cool them, but the muscles of his throat stayed hot and aching with all those tears held back, pressing forward for no reason he could name.

  “Headache?” the face in the mirror asked.

  Ben Joe nodded silently.

  “I’ll get you an aspirin.” She stood up and started for the door. When she was directly in front of him she stopped there—looking down at him, he guessed—but she didn’t say anything and after a minute she went on out.

  She was gone long enough for him to be sitting up straight and whistling a little tune under his breath before she entered again.

  Soft as the voices of a-angels …

  he whistled. Downstairs Gram’s voice, coming loudly and only a little indistinctly through three closed doors, tramped along with him.

  “Here,” Joanne said. She handed him an aspirin and a glass of water.

  “Thank you,” he said cheerfully.

  He swallowed the pill with one gulp of water and set the glass down on the floor beside his chair. There was a frown on his face now; he sat with his hands clasped tightly together and tried to think of a way to help Joanne say what she wanted to.

  “Um, if by any chance you changed your mind about leaving Kansas …”he said.

  He paused, waiting without realizing it for Joanne to interrupt, but she didn’t.

  “If just by chance you did,” he said finally, “I don’t know that I would call it going backwards instead of forwards. Sometimes it’s not the same place when a person goes back to it, or not the same …”

  That little inner mind of his, always scrutinizing him as if it were a separate individual from him, winced. Ben Joe nodded and tipped his hat to it; the separate mind returned his bow and withdrew.

  “Not the same person,” he finished.

  “Oh,” Joanne said. She was looking down at her hands, acting as if this were a brand-new idea that would have to be given time to soak in.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. Her voice was relieved, and lighthearted. “That is something to think about, I guess …”

  Ben Joe stood up. “Thank you for the aspirin,” he said.

  “That’s all right. Bye.”

  “Good-by.”

  He bowed again, this time for real, and left, clicking the door gently shut behind him.

  16

  Ben Joe came downstairs as slowly and quietly as possible; his feet instinctively veered away from the centers of the steps, where the slightest pressure always brought forth a creaking noise. In his left hand was his suitcase, held high and away from his body so that it wouldn’t bang against anything. His right hand was on the polished stair railing. His whole face seemed to be concentrated on the sleek wood of it and the thin film of wax that clung a little to his skin. He lifted his hand and rubbed his thumb and fingers together, frowning down, and then abruptly dropped his hand to his side and descended to the next step. As yet he had not made a single sound. He could go all the way downstairs and out the front door without anyone’s ever knowing it if he wanted to. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to. If he left without saying good-by, could he really feel he had left for good? He switched the suitcase to his other hand and began descending more rapidly, still frowning at how silly he would feel to announce so suddenly that he was leaving. In the back of his mind he knew he would never leave the house without telling anyone; yet his feet still moved cautiously and he still held the suitcase carefully away from the railing.

  Once in the downstairs hall, he moved quickly across the half-lit area between the stairs and the front door. There was a square of warm yellow light on the rug, cast through the wide archway of the living room, and the murmuring voices of his sisters were as clear as if they were out in the hall also, but nobody noticed when he crossed the yellow square. At the front door he stopped, setting his suitcase by his feet, and stood there a minute and then turned back and entered the yellow square again.

  “Mom?” he said at the living-room doorway.


  “Mmm.” She didn’t look up. She was sitting on the couch, sipping her after-supper Tom Collins and leafing through a Ladies’ Home Journal. Beside her Gram was reading Carol a chapter out of Winnie-the-Pooh, although Carol wasn’t listening, and on the other side of the room Jenny and Tessie and the twins were arguing over a game of gin rummy. The other two were out somewhere—Susannah with the school phys-ed instructor and Joanne with Gary, showing him her home town before they went back to Kansas in the morning. But those who were still at home looked so calm and cheerful, sitting in their lamp-lit room, that Ben Joe almost wished he could stay with them and forget the suitcase at the front door.

  “Hey, Mom,” he said.

  “What is it?” She looked up, holding one finger in the magazine to mark her place. “Oh, Ben Joe. Why don’t you come on in?”

  “ ‘Many happy returns of Eeyore’s birthday,’ ” Gram was saying in her bright, reading-aloud voice. Carol sniffed and bent down to touch the bunny ears on one of her slippers, and Gram glared at her. “I said, ‘Many happy returns of—’ ”

  “I’m going back to school,” Ben Joe said.

  “ ‘Eeyore’s birthday,’ ” Gram went on, no longer looking at the book but just finishing the sentence automatically. “Where you say you’re going, Ben Joe?”

  “To school,” he said.

  “You mean, tonight you’re going?”

  “Yes’m.”

  His mother folded the page over and then closed the magazine. “Well, I don’t see—” she began.

  “I just suddenly remembered this test I’ve got, Mom. I really have to go. I’m going to catch that early train …”

  His sisters turned around from their card game and looked at him.

  “Where’s your suitcase?” Jane asked.

  “Out in the hall. I just stopped in to say good-by.”

  “Well, I should hope so,” said his mother. “Why didn’t you tell us earlier? Now I don’t know what to do about those shirts of yours that are still in the laundry—”