“Do you want the puppets, the equipment, the job? Want me to be the one to go?”
“Oh, well, no, I couldn’t ask—”
“Really, what do I need with all that? Take it,” Leon said.
“Oh.”
“Take it.”
“Well, if you’re sure,” said Morgan. Then Leon said, “Aah, God, Morgan.” He spoke wearily, disgustedly, but not with any sharpness. Even so, Morgan flinched.
When they resumed walking, it was in the other direction, homeward. They passed Eunola’s Restaurant, where the three of them had so often stopped for coffee. Then they came to the Laundromat where Morgan had stood, countless times, watching Leon and Emily setting out with their baby. Perhaps, he thought, this was not so much a love story as a friendship story, and he felt saddened by Leon’s patient, trudging figure beside him. (Where was that thin, olive-skinned boy parting the curtains to call for a doctor? Would Emily ever again, in the future, wear that tilted look she had first tossed Morgan?)
They crossed the street and entered the building. When Morgan saw the long stairway, he believed, for a moment, that he might not make it. He was exhausted, and his chest ached. But a strange thing happened. As he climbed, it seemed his spirits climbed too. He speeded up, leaving Leon behind, taking steps two at a time. He wanted to get on with this. He wanted to begin his new life.
1978
1
Cinderella was dancing with the Prince, nestled in his brown felt arms, gliding across the walnut desk in somebody’s father’s study. Over her head, blue satin swoops hung from the folding wooden stage. There was a scrim at the rear that didn’t entirely conceal the puppeteers, but the audience was too entranced to notice. It was a very young audience—mostly four-year-olds. The birthday child wore a gilt paper crown that resembled the Prince’s.
“Mercy,” Cinderella said, “it must be getting late. I’m sure it’s nearly midnight.”
“Midnight? So what?” the Prince asked in his gruff, rasping voice. “We’ll dance till dawn. We’ll dance all the next day!”
“Um, well, but you see, Your Majesty …” They were stalling for time. Where was the clock? “The clock!” Emily whispered. Gina was off in a trance again, holding the cassette recorder just beyond Emily’s reach and gazing dreamily at the audience. Joshua, who was supposed to be in Gina’s care, was creeping under the desk. He gurgled to himself and dribbled on a nest of extension cords.
“Ding, ding!” Emily called in desperation. “Ding, ding, ding …”
Somewhere in there she lost count, but she trusted that the audience wouldn’t catch it. She could hardly wait to whisk Cinderella off the stage so she could rescue the baby. The instant the curtain was lowered, she snatched him up. He wore only a grayish diaper. His solid little trunk, barrel-shaped, was faintly sticky, and he trailed a silvery, cool thread of spit down the back of Emily’s hand.
“Gina, honey,” Emily said, “I thought you were going to watch him for me. ‘Oh, I can manage both,’ you told me, ‘mind Josh and do the props too …’ ”
Morgan, meanwhile, was digging through a pile of objects on the floor. “Fireplace, fireplace,” he muttered. “What’s happened to the fireplace?”
“Gina had it last.”
But Gina was busy with thoughts of her own. Eleven years old, tall and secretive, languorous from half a summer of lolling about in the heat, she sat on a leather chair with her knees cocked and hummed the waltz that Cinderella had been dancing to. “Here we are,” Morgan said. He straightened, puffing, and held up the cardboard fireplace. Joshua reached for it, but Morgan was too quick for him. He set the fireplace in one corner of the stage. “Now, where’s the stepmother?” he asked Emily. “Where are the sisters?”
“Gina? Take Josh for me, will you?”
Gina unfolded herself with a sigh and accepted the baby. He grabbed at her shiny hair clasp. He grabbed at Morgan’s sailor cap, in passing, but was borne away to the leather chair. “Tra la la,” Gina sang, rocking him too hard.
Out front, the audience grew hushed and expectant. Emily slipped off Cinderella’s ballgown, exposing her burlap rags. She held her up, ready to go, and smiled at Morgan. He nodded and raised the curtain.
2
“You know that Kate’s home,” Bonny said.
“Oh, really?” said Emily. “I hadn’t heard.” She switched the receiver to her other ear. She was trying to stir a stew and talk on the phone simultaneously. “Has something happened?” she asked.
Instead of answering, Bonny let out a long, thin breath. All of a sudden, this late in her life, Bonny had taken up smoking. She didn’t smoke very competently and always seemed to be inhaling or exhaling at exactly the wrong moment, leaving her listeners suspended. She had also developed other new habits. She continually joined strange philosophical societies and women’s groups, began unpromising jobs and then resigned almost at once, and telephoned Emily at any hour she pleased. Although she never mentioned Morgan without biting his name off, she seemed not to blame Emily at all. This was a relief, of course, but it was also a little insulting. (It implied that Emily was powerless, without a will of her own.) When Bonny paused for one of her cigarette breaths, Emily pictured the humming wires that linked them. Bonny was knotted into her line, knotted into her whole existence. Even if Emily were to hang up, Bonny’s phone would still connect hers because Bonny was the one who’d placed the call.
“She has this back,” Bonny said. “This sprained or twisted back, or something. The way it came about was, she and her husband were involved in a head-on collision. David walked away from it without a scratch, but Kate did something to her back.”
“What happened to the other driver?” Emily asked.
“What other driver?”
“The driver of the other car.”
“David was the driver of the other car.”
“You mean she collided with her husband?”
“Yes, and got this injured back, this sprained or twisted back; I’m telling you,” Bonny said.
“Oh, now I see.”
“Well, I wanted her to come home because I can nurse her better than David could. Heaven knows I’ve had the practice. And besides that, I’ve been attending these lectures on a whole different kind of nutrition, a diet that heals any sort of ailment. It works on physical problems, mental problems, depressions, infections, tumors … You may not remember this, but last winter, when Molly was mugged in Buffalo while she was taking her son to the emergency room …”
Salting the stew, tasting it, listening with half an ear, Emily considered the Gowers’ accidents: their wrecks, falls, and fires, all those events through which they slid so blithely. To Emily, who had no accidents whatsoever, their lives sounded catastrophic; but to Bonny, sheer custom must have leveled everything out. Emily tried to imagine reaching such a stage. She couldn’t begin to.
Even now that Morgan’s household had moved to hers, she thought—his mother and sister and dog, his hats and suits—she herself didn’t seem to have been transformed in any way at all.
3
Emily took Gina shopping. Gina was going to Camp Hopalong in Virginia for the month of August, at Leon’s parents’ expense. It was time she learned to live away from home, they said. Emily was uneasy about it. She didn’t like doing without Gina for so long, and also she was afraid that in Virginia, near Leon and his parents, Gina would somehow be stolen from her—turned against her. They would point out that Emily was immoral or deceitful or irresponsible, oh, any number of things, she just knew it; and Emily would not be there to explain herself. But she didn’t tell Gina that. Instead, she said, “You’re so young, you might get lonesome. Remember how Morgan had to bring you back from Randallstown? You couldn’t make it through a simple slumber party.”
“Oh, Mama. That was at Kitty Potts’s house and she had that group of girls that didn’t like me.”
“Still,” Emily said.
“Everybody goes to camp. I’m not a baby any more.”<
br />
Emily hoisted Joshua on her hip and walked Gina down Crosswell Street to Merger Street, to Poor John’s Basement. Holding Camp Hopalong’s checklist in her free hand, she informed the salesgirl that they needed six pairs of white shorts. Six pairs! It was lucky Leon’s parents were paying for the clothes as well. Gina took a stack of shorts into a curtained booth, while Emily waited outside. (Recently, Gina’d turned modest.) The salesgirl, awkward on her platform sandals as some frail, hoofed animal, hung in the background, clutching one elbow. Joshua started fussing and leaning out of Emily’s arms, but she couldn’t put him down because the floor was filthy—blackened boards permanently stamped with scraps of foil and gray disks of chewing gum. Joshua grew heavier and heavier. Emily called, “Gina? Honey, hurry, please. It’s nearly lunchtime.”
There was no answer. She knocked on the wall near the booth and then drew the curtain aside. Gina was standing before a full-length mirror, wearing a stained T-shirt and a pair of blinding white shorts with cardboard tags dangling from a belt loop. Tears rolled down her face. She seemed to be watching them in the mirror. “Honey!” Emily said. “What’s wrong?”
“I look like a freak,” Gina said.
“Oh, Gina.”
“I’m fat.”
“Fat! You’re skin and bones.”
“Look: great bobbles of fat. Obese! And my knees don’t match.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Emily said. She looked to the salesgirl for help. “Isn’t that ridiculous?”
The salesgirl blew a perfect pink bubble.
“I wish I were dead,” Gina said.
“Honey, would you rather not go to camp?”
Gina sniffed and said, “No, I’ll go.”
“You don’t have to, you know.”
“I want to.”
“They can’t force you.”
“I want to,” Gina said. “I want to get out of here! And never come back. I’m sick of everything always so messy, babies and diapers and those two old ladies taking up my bedroom. You just let them move right in on me. You acted glad to have them. Nobody else at St. Andrew’s sleeps on a fold-out bed. And that dog that snores, and Morgan’s stupid tools and things anyplace I want to sit. I’m fed up with him! Does he have to wear those hats all the time? Does he have to make such a show of himself?”
“Why, Gina!” Emily said.
But later, when they’d walked home, it was to Morgan that Gina acted friendliest. At lunch she kept giggling with him, and then flashing some kind of challenge at Emily with her flat, black, unreadable eyes.
4
“I’m much more free than I used to be,” Bonny said. “I mean, he used to color my world so. You know how that is?”
There was something wrong with the telephone. Other lines seemed to be spilling into it. Emily heard faint laughter and a burble of distant voices. “No,” she said, worming a screwdriver out of Joshua’s grasp. “No, not exactly.”
“Oh, he was so tiring! Everything had to be larger than life, extravagant, grandiloquent. Take my brother, Billy. You’ve met Billy. He hasn’t been lucky in marriage. He’s had three wives. But three is not an impossible number. I mean, the way Morgan always spoke of him, you’d think Billy’d been married dozens of times. ‘Now, who is his wife at the moment?’ he’d ask. ‘Do I know her name?’ And somehow we all fell in with it. Even Billy, it seemed, came to believe that he’d had this great, long train of wives. He made jokes about it, acted like a drop-in guest at his own weddings. There! See? I’m talking as if he had a wedding every week.”
Something was boiling over on the stove. At the kitchen table Brindle slouched in her long, white, dingy bathrobe, laying out her Tarot cards, and when she heard the hiss of steam she looked up, but she did nothing about it. Emily stepped over the dog, stretched to the end of her cord, and took the pan off the stove and set it in the sink. “Bonny, I’m cooking supper now,” she said.
“He only feels he’s real when he’s in other people’s eyes,” Bonny told her. “Things have to be viewed. All alone in the bathroom, he’s no one. That’s why his family doesn’t count. They tend not to see him; you know how families are. So he has to go out and find himself in someone else’s line of vision. Oh, how wearing he was! I blame it on his mother. She expected so much of him—especially after his father died. ‘You can be anything,’ she told him. He must have misunderstood. He thought she said, ‘You can be everything.’ ”
“He’s wonderful with Gina,” Emily said.
“I feel sorry for you,” Bonny said.
5
Trunks and dress forms, a rusty birdcage, barrels containing a gigantic cup-and-saucer collection muffled in straw, stacks of National Geographics, Brindle’s catalogs, Louisa’s autograph book, a samovar, a carton of records, a lady’s bicycle, a wicker elephant. And this was only what lined the hall, which had once been as empty as a tunnel. In the living room: two sets of encyclopedias (one general, one medical), a spread-out jigsaw puzzle, Louisa’s platform rocker with several yards of knitting coiled in the seat, and half a dozen runny watercolors of peaches, pears, and grapes-products of an art course Brindle had taken twenty years ago, back when she was married to her first husband. The husband himself (pink-faced, with a windowpane of white painted on his bald skull like the shine on an apple) hung in a curly gold frame above a bookcase full of manuals.
In Gina’s room there was almost no floor—just a field of bureaus and unmade beds. In Morgan’s and Emily’s room were more bureaus (two and a half for Morgan alone), the bed, the sewing machine, Gina’s old, yellowed crib with the tattered eyelet canopy they’d brought up from the basement for Joshua, and puppets dangling from the picture rails, since there wasn’t space in the closet. The closet held Morgan’s clothing. There, also, no floor was evident—no air, even. Step inside and you’d be impacted in a solid, felty darkness, faintly smelling of mothballs.
Emily loved it all.
She began to understand why Morgan’s daughters kept coming home when they had to convalesce from something. You could draw vitality from mere objects, evidently—from the seething souvenirs of dozens of lives raced through at full throttle. Morgan’s mother and sister (both, in their ways, annoying, demanding, querulous women) troubled her not a bit, because they weren’t hers. They were too foreign to be hers. Foreign: that was the word. All she touched, dusted, and edged around was part of a foreign country, mysterious and exotic. She drew in deep breaths, as if trying to taste the difference in the air. She was fascinated by her son, who did not seem really, truly her own, though she loved him immeasurably. At meals, she tended to keep silent and to watch everybody with a small, pleased smile. At night in bed, she never lost her surprise at finding herself alongside this bearded man, this completely other person. She felt drawn to him by something far outside herself—by strings that pulled her, by ropes. Waking in the dark, she rolled toward him with a kind of stunned sensation. She was conscious of their two surfaces meeting noticeably: oil and water.
But Morgan said they had to move to some place bigger—a place with more bathrooms, at least. He was sorry, he said, to be putting her through this. He knew she had never bargained on having his female relatives dumped at her door like stray cats. (Actually, they had climbed the stairs themselves, wearing gloves, but it was true that Bonny’d just dropped them off in front of the building.) He would like, he said, a house in the country—a large, bare farmhouse. However, there was the matter of money. Even keeping this apartment was difficult, nowadays. Mrs. Apple had raised the rent. She was not as friendly as she’d once been, Emily thought. And Morgan had lost his job. Emily felt that this was spitefulness on Bonny’s part. Why should Morgan’s private arrangements affect his work at Cullen Hardware? But Morgan said that was Uncle Ollie’s doing, not Bonny’s. In fact, he said, Uncle Ollie had seemed to leap at the opportunity—had rushed to the store as soon as he heard the news and flung Morgan’s wardrobe onto the sidewalk, the selfsame wardrobe Bonny had flung there earlier. (People were
so eager to get rid of his clothes, Morgan mourned.) It so happened that Morgan was out, at the time. He returned to find Uncle Ollie planted in front of the store, rising from a billow of hats. “Is it true what they tell me?” “Yes.” “Then you’re fired.” If he had said, “No,” Morgan claimed, Uncle Ollie would no doubt have been disappointed. He must have been waiting all along for such a chance.
Now Morgan had no steady employment, although a couple of times a week he clerked at the plumbing-supply store down the street. Emily tried to make more and more puppets, faster and faster, working late at night while Josh was asleep. Whenever Morgan saw her bent over her sewing machine, he apologized. He said, “You look like someone in an ad for unions.” What he didn’t understand was that Emily felt happier now than she’d ever felt before. She rattled inside this new life like … well, like Morgan in one of his hats, she supposed. But he went on apologizing. He couldn’t believe she didn’t mind.
When the time arrived for Leon to drive to Baltimore and pick up Gina, Emily cleaned the apartment so he wouldn’t imagine she had let things go. But she didn’t try to straighten the clutter, or get Brindle out of her bathrobe. And she didn’t hide Morgan’s collection of outdated Esso maps or his latest woodworking project—a formless bundle of two-by-fours leaning in a corner of the bathroom.
It was a Saturday he was coming. Saturday morning she got up early, not that she had any choice: Joshua woke her. She took him out to the kitchen and fed him, balancing his warm, damp weight in her lap. He waved his fists and pedaled with his feet as soon as he saw his cereal. His four lower teeth, as crisp as grains of rice, clicked against the spoon. He was a beautiful baby-dark and creamy-skinned, like Gina, but easier than she had been. Leon had never met him.
Gina came in, wearing her new white shorts and a Camp Hopalong T-shirt. “How come you’re up so early?” Emily asked her.