“Well, but this here Hide-a-Key—”
“Are you not standing in the presence of a man whose wife perpetually mislays his car keys for him?” Morgan asked.
The man glanced around him.
“Me, I mean. She loses all I own,” Morgan said, “and I’ve never had a Hide-a-Key in my life.”
“Well, still,” the man said doggedly, “I think I’ll just go on ahead with this here.”
“What is it?” Morgan asked. “You don’t have dental floss? Never mind! I tell you what I’ll do: you come back this same time tomorrow, I’ll have a piece for you from home. Free, no charge. A gift. All right? I’ll bring you in a yard or two.”
“For Christ’s sake,” said the man, “will you let me buy one cruddy Hide-a-Key?”
Morgan flung his hands up. “Of course!” he said. “Be my guest! Waste your money! Fill your life with junk!” He stabbed the cash-register keys. “A dollar twenty-nine,” he said.
“It’s my dollar twenty-nine, I’ll waste it however I like,” said the man, pressing the money into Morgan’s palm. “Maniac.”
“Junkie!”
The man rushed off, clutching his Hide-a-Key. Morgan muttered to himself and slammed the cash register shut.
When Butkins came back, Morgan was free to go to lunch. He went to the No Jive Café; he liked their pickles. All the other customers were black, though, and they wouldn’t talk to him. They seemed to spend their mealtimes passing tiny wads of money to the counterman, and then mumbling and looking off sideways under lowered lids. Meanwhile Morgan slouched over his plate and chewed happily on a pickle. It really was a wonderful pickle. The garlic was so strong it almost fizzed. But you only got one to a plate, alongside your sandwich. He’d asked time and time again for an extra, but they always said no; he’d have to order another hamburger that he didn’t even want.
After he finished eating, he thought he’d take a walk. He had a regular pattern of places he liked to visit. He zipped his parka and set off. The day had not warmed up much; the passers-by had pinched, teary faces. Morgan was glad of his beard. He turned up his collar and held it close and proceeded almost at a run, squinting against the wind.
First to Potter, the used-instrument dealer, but Potter had someone with him—a gawky, plain young woman trying out a violin. “Father Morgan!” Potter cried. “Miss Miller, meet Father Morgan, the street priest of Baltimore. How’s it going? How’re your addicts? Come in and have some tea!”
But customers here were rare, and Morgan didn’t want to interrupt. “No, no,” he said, holding up a hand. “I must be on my way. Blessings!” and he backed out the door.
He cut through an alley and came out on Marianna Street. An exotic woman with a torrent of black hair stood beside a hot-dog cart. Her make-up was stupendous—a coppery glaze on her skin, a flaring red slash of a mouth, and mascara so heavily applied that each eyelash seemed strung with black beads. Now that it was winter, she was wrapped in old coats and sweaters, but Morgan knew from warmer seasons that underneath she wore a red lace dress and an armload of chipped, flaking, gold-tone bracelets. “Zosem pas!” he called out to her.
“Well, hey!” she said. She spoke extra brightly, exaggerating her lip movements. “How you today? Get a letter from home?”
Morgan smiled humbly and looked perplexed.
“Letter!” she shouted. She wrote on her palm with an imaginary pencil. “You get a letter?”
“Ah!” said Morgan, suddenly realizing. He shook his head. “Pok,” he said sadly. “Kun salomen baso.” The corners of his mouth turned down; he scuffed a boot against the wheel of her cart.
“You poor man,” she said. “Well, maybe tomorrow, huh?”
“Brankuso,” he told her. “Zosem pas!” and he waved and grinned and walked on.
At the corner of Marianna Street and Crosswell he hesitated. What he would really like was to turn down Crosswell—just ahead in that general direction. What harm could it do? He hadn’t been in several weeks. He’d resisted temptation admirably. He shoved both hands in his pockets and set out.
CRAFTS UNLIMITED, the sign in the middle of the block said. It was an elderly building, four stories tall. The first-floor bay window was full of patchwork quilts, cornhusk dolls, samplers, woven goods, and puppets. The windows above it were narrower, dark and uncurtained. It was the third-floor windows that Morgan watched, from the shadow of a Laundromat doorway—Emily and Leon Meredith’s windows. He had learned their address with no trouble at all, just looked it up in the telephone book. He’d learned that along about now (just before the baby’s nap, he supposed) one or the other of the Merediths would float up behind the window on the left and tug it open. A hand would trail out—Emily’s pale hand or Leon’s darker one—and there would be a still, considering moment while they pondered how to dress the baby for her outing. Morgan enjoyed that. (Bonny, with the last few children, had simply thrown whatever was closest into the stroller—a blanket, or some older child’s jacket; anything would do.) He imagined that the Merediths would also sprinkle a few drops of milk on their wrists before giving their daughter a bottle, and would test the water with the tip of an elbow before lowering her into her bath—whatever was instructed, he liked to believe. Whatever the proper method was. He waited, smiling upward, with both hands buried deep in his pockets.
Had he missed them? No, here they came, out the glass door beside the CRAFTS UNLIMITED sign. Leon carried the baby over his shoulder. (Naturally they would not have bought a carriage.) She must be nine or ten months old by now—a fat, apple-cheeked child in a thick snowsuit. Emily walked next to Leon, with her hand tucked through his arm and her face lifted and bright, talking to the baby and tripping along in her shabby trenchcoat and little black slippers. Morgan loved the way the Merediths dressed. It seemed they had decided, long ago, what clothes would be their trademark, and they never swerved from it. Leon always wore clean khaki trousers and a white shirt. Below the sleeves of his rust-colored corduroy jacket, a half-inch of immaculate white cuff emerged. And Emily wore one of three scoop-necked leotards—brown, plum, or (most often) black—with a matching wrap skirt of some limp material that flowed to mid-calf length. He had noticed such outfits in modern-dance productions on TV, and admired their fluidity. Now he saw that, worn on the street, they made fashion seem beside the point. In fact, the hemline was wrong for this year or even for this decade, he suspected, and who ever heard of such a young girl in such drab colors? But these costumes seemed to carry their own authority. She didn’t look outdated at all. She looked stark, pared down. She had done away with the extras.
He enjoyed imagining their eat-in kitchen, with just two plates and two sets of silver and an earthenware bowl for the baby. He liked to think that their bathroom contained a bar of Ivory soap and three hotel towels. Well, and Leon’s shaving things, of course. But nothing else. No bath oil, talcum tins, acne creams, hairdryers, children’s orthodontic appliances, mingled bottles of perfume swearing at each other, dangling bras and nylons and lace-edged shower caps. He gazed longingly after the Merediths. Their two oval faces swung away, private and impenetrable. Their daughter’s face was round as a coin, and stayed visible long after her parents had turned their backs on him, but she was no easier to read.
Of course, what he should have done was gallop across and catch up with them. “Remember me? Dr. Morgan. Remember? What a coincidence! I just chanced to be in the neighborhood, you see …” It wouldn’t be difficult. He could take the baby’s pulse, inquire about her DPT shots. Doctoring was so easy—a matter of mere common sense. It was almost too easy. He’d have more trouble sustaining the role of electrician, or one of those men who blow insulating material between the walls of houses.
Nevertheless, something stopped him. He felt awed by the Merediths—by their austerity, their certitude, their mapped and charted lives. He let them float away untouched, like people in a bubble.
4
Afternoon drifted over the store, and twilight sank
into the corners. Butkins swallowed a yawn and mused at the window. Morgan invented an elaborate sort of paddlewheel device to tip squirrels off the bird feeder. He sanded each paddle carefully and fitted it into place. He felt comforted and steadied by this kind of work. It made him think of his father, a methodical man who might have been much happier as a carpenter than as an ineffectual high-school English teacher. “One thing our family has always believed in,” his father used to say, “is the very best quality tools. You buy the best tools for the job: drop-forged steel, hardwood handles. And then you take good care of them. Everything in its place. Lots of naval jelly.” It was the only philosophy he had ever stated outright, and Morgan clung to it now like something carved in stone. His father had killed himself during Morgan’s last year of high school. Without a hint of despair or ill health (though he’d always seemed somewhat muted), he had taken a room at the Winken Blinken Motor Hotel one starry April evening and slit both wrists with a razor blade. Morgan had spent a large part of his life trying to figure out why. All he wanted was a reason—bad debts, cancer, blackmail, an illicit love affair; nothing would have dismayed him. Anything would have been preferable to this nebulous, ambiguous trailing off. Had his father, perhaps, been wretched in his marriage? Fallen under the power of racketeers? Committed murder? He rifled his father’s correspondence, stole his desk key and his cardboard file box. He mercilessly cross-examined his mother, but she seemed no wiser than Morgan, or maybe she just didn’t want to talk about it. She went around silent and exhausted; she’d taken a job at Hutzler’s selling gloves. Gradually, Morgan stopped asking. The possibility had begun to settle on him, lately, as imperceptibly as dust, that perhaps there’d been no reason after all. Maybe a man’s interest in life could just thin to a trickle and dry up; was that it? He hated to believe it. He pushed the thought away, any time it came to him. And even now he often pored over the file box he had stolen, but he never found more than he’d found at the start: alphabetized instruction sheets for assembling bicycles, cleaning lawnmowers, and installing vacuum-cleaner belts. Repairing, replacing, maintaining. One step follows another, and if you have completed step two, then step three will surely come to you.
He sanded the paddlewheel, nodding gently. He hummed without any tune.
Butkins came up the stairs to say, “I’m going now, if that’s all you need. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Eh?” said Morgan. “Is it time?” He straightened and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Well, yes, surely, Butkins,” he said. “So long, then.”
The store fell silent and grew fuzzy with darkness. Passers-by hurried home to supper without even glancing in. Morgan got to his feet, put on his parka, and made his way up the aisle. He switched off the lights and locked the three massive, burglar-proof locks. From outside, the place looked like an antique photograph: lifeless, blurred, the knobs and bulges in its window a mystery forever. Maybe Grandfather Cullen’s ghost came here, nights, and roamed the aisles in a daze, ruminating over the rechargeable hedge clippers. Morgan turned his collar up and ran to catch the bus.
5
At supper the grownups sat bunched at one end of the table as if taking refuge from the children—Morgan in his hat, Bonny and Louisa, and Morgan’s sister, Brindle, wearing a lavender bathrobe. Brindle had her mother’s sallow, eagle face and hunched posture, but not her vitality. She sat idly buttering pieces of French bread, which she placed in a circle on the rim of her plate, while Louisa recounted, word for word, a cooking program she’d been watching on TV. “First he put the veal shanks endwise in a pot. Then he poured over them a sauce made of tomato paste, lemon zest, bits of celery … but everything was cut up ahead of time! Naturally it looks easy if you don’t have to witness all the peeling and chopping.” Morgan reached across her for the salt. “There’s not enough real life on television,” Louisa said.
“That’s the whole point,” Brindle told her.
“I’d like to see him try scraping the tomato paste out of that little tiny Hunt’s can, too.”
“Mother, you went through all this last week,” Brindle said. “That’s a re-run you were watching, and you made all the same objections too.”
“I did not! I knew nothing about such programs last week.”
“You told us every bit of it: the lemon zest, the celery …”
“Are you accusing me of a faulty memory?” Louisa asked.
“Ladies. Please,” said Morgan. It was true there seemed to be some problem lately with his mother’s memory. She had spells when she was doggedly repetitive; her mind, like an old record, appeared to stick in certain grooves. But it only made her nervous to have it brought to her attention. He scowled at Brindle, who shrugged and buttered another slice of bread.
Meanwhile his daughters ate in a separate flurry of gossip and quarrels and giggles—seven slim, blue-jeaned girls and then someone else, a little white-haired waif with rhinestone ear studs, some friend of Kate’s. She sat between Kate and Amy and stared at Morgan narrowly, as if she disapproved of him. It made him nervous. He was never truly happy if he felt that even the most random passing stranger found him unlikable. He’d begun the meal in a fine mood, twirling his spaghetti theatrically on his fork and speaking a broad Italian accent, but gradually he lost his enthusiasm. “What do you keep looking at?” he asked now. “Have we met before?”
“Sir?”
“This is Coquette,” Kate told him.
“Ah. Coquette.”
“Me and her are in the same class at school. We like the same boy.”
Morgan frowned. “Same what?” he said.
“This boy named Jackson Eps.”
“But you’re only in fifth grade!”
“We liked him in fourth grade too.”
“This is ridiculous,” Morgan told Bonny. Bonny smiled at him; she never knew when to start worrying. “What are things coming to?” he asked his sister. “Where are we headed, here? It’s all these Barbie dolls, Ken dolls, Tinkerbell make-up sets.”
“I liked a boy in fifth grade,” Brindle said.
“You did?”
“Robert Roberts.”
“Oh, Lord, Brindle, not Robert Roberts again.”
“Robert Roberts was in fifth grade?” Kate asked. She nudged Coquette. “Robert Roberts was Brindle’s childhood sweetheart,” she said.
“He was not only in fifth grade,” said Brindle, “he was also in fourth, third, second … We used to have to share our reading-skills workbook; he was always losing his. In kindergarten we went shopping once at Bargain Billy’s and he stuck a label on my cheek reading SLIGHTLY IMPERFECT. He also took me to my first school dance and my first car-date and my senior-class picnic.”
Morgan sighed and tipped his chair back. Bonny helped herself to more salad.
“Then in college I broke it off,” Brindle told Coquette. “I gave him back his high-school ring with the candle wax still in it to make it fit my finger—half a candle’s worth, it looked like. I’d probably have drowned if I ever wore it swimming.”
“Why’d you break it off?” Coquette asked her.
“I got married to someone else.”
“But why’d you break it off? I mean, why marry someone else?”
Brindle pushed her plate away and set her elbows on the table. She said, “Well, I don’t know if … When I talk about him, it sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But see, even back in kindergarten he would sometimes act silly and sometimes bore me, and yet other times I was crazy about him, and when we grew up it got worse. Sometimes I liked him and sometimes I didn’t like him, and sometimes I didn’t even think of him. And sometimes he didn’t like me, I knew it; we knew each other so well. It never occurred to me it would be that way with anyone. I mean, he was my only experience. You understand what I’m trying to say?”
Plainly, Coquette didn’t understand a word. She was growing restless, glancing toward the plate of Oreos on the sideboard. But Brindle didn’t see that. “What I did,” she said, “w
as marry an older man. Man who lived next door to Mother’s old house, downtown. It was a terrible mistake. He was the jealous type, possessive, always fearing I would leave him. He never gave me any money, only charge accounts and then this teeny bit of cash for the groceries every week. For seven years I charged our food at the gourmet sections of department stores—tiny cans of ham and pure-white asparagus spears and artichoke bottoms and hearts of palm, all so I could save back some of the grocery money. I would charge a dozen skeins of yarn and then return them one by one to the Knitter’s Refund counter for cash. I subscribed to every cents-off, money-back offer that came along. At the end of seven years I said, ‘All right, Horace, I’ve saved up five thousand dollars of my own. I’m leaving.’ And I left.”
“She had to save five thousand dollars,” Morgan told the ceiling, “to catch a city bus from her house to my house. Three and a half miles—four at the most.”
“I felt I’d been challenged,” Brindle said.
“And it’s not as if I hadn’t offered to help her out, all along.”
“I felt I wanted to show him, ‘See there? You can’t overcome me so easily; I’ve got more spirit than you think,’ ” Brindle said.
Morgan wondered if supplies of spirit were rationed. Did each person only get so much, which couldn’t be replenished once it was used up? For in the four years since leaving her husband she’d stayed plopped on Morgan’s third floor, seldom dressing in anything but her faded lavender bathrobe. To this day, she’d never mentioned finding a job or an apartment of her own. And when her husband died of a stroke, not six months after she’d left, she hardly seemed to care one way or the other. “Oh, well,” was all she’d said, “I suppose this saves me a trip to Nero.”
“Don’t you mean Reno?” Morgan had asked.
“Whatever,” she said.
The only time she showed any spirit, in fact, was when she was telling this story. Her eyes grew triangular; her skin had a stretched look. “I haven’t had an easy time of it, you see,” she said. “It all worked out so badly. And Robert Roberts, well, I hear he went and married a Gaithersburg girl. I just turn my back on him for a second and off he goes and gets married. Isn’t that something? Not that I hold him to blame. I know I did it to myself. I’ve ruined my life, all on my own, and it’s far too late to change it. I just set all the switches and did all the steering and headed straight toward ruin.”