Morgan's Passing Read Online Free PDF Page A

his daughters’ tattered picture books and grade-school textbooks and Nancy Drews, and his mother’s tiny, plump autograph book, whose gilded title had been eaten away by worms or mildew or maybe just plain time, so that all that remained was a faintly shining trail of baldness as if asnail had crossed the crimson velvet in a tortuous script that coincidentally spelled out
Autographs
. (And on the first, yellowed page, in a hand so steely and elegant that you’d only see it now on a wedding invitation:
Louisa dearest, Uncle Charlie is not a poet so will only write his name hereunder, Charles Brindle, Christmas Day, 1911
—that awkward little shrug of inadequacy descending through the years so clearly, though the man had been dead a quarter-century or more and even Louisa might have had trouble recollecting him.) The bottom shelf held a varnished plaque of Girl Scout knots, a nearly perfect conch shell, and a brown cardboard photo album pasted with photographs so widely spaced in time that whole generations seemed to be dashing past, impatient to get it over with. Here was Morgan’s father, Samuel, a boy in knickers; and next to him stood Samuel full-grown, marrying Louisa with her bobbed hair and shiny stockings. Here was little Morgan in a badly knitted pram set; and Morgan at eleven holding his infant sister, Brindle, as if he might have preferred to drop her (and look! was that the same pram set? only slightly more puckered and with some new stain or shadow down the front). And then suddenly Morgan at twenty-four, shorter-haired than he would ever be again, raw-necked, self-conscious, beside his plump, smiling wife with their first baby in his arms. (No telling where
their
wedding photo had got to, or that famous pram set either, for all Amy wore was a sagging diaper.) Now they stopped for breath for a moment. Here were fifteen solid pages of the infant Amy, every photo snapped by Morgan in the first proud flush of fatherhood. Amy sleeping, nursing, yawning, bathing, examining her fist. Amy learning to sit. Amy learning to crawl. Amy learning to walk. She was a sturdy child with her mother’s sensible expression, and she appeared to be more real than anyone else in the album. Maybe it was the slowness with which she plodded, page by page, through the early stages of her life. She took on extra meaning, like the frame at which amovie is halted. (The experts lean forward; someone points to something with a long, official pointer …) Then the photos speeded up again. Here was the infant Jean, then the twins in their miniature spectacles, then Liz on her first day of nursery school. The film changed to Kodachrome, brighter than nature, and the setting was always the beach now—always Bethany Beach, Delaware, for where else could a man with seven daughters find the time for his camera? To look at the album, you would imagine that these people enjoyed an endless stream of vacations. Bonny was eternally sunburned, bulging gently above and below her one-piece Lastex swimsuit. The girls were eternally coconut-oiled and gleaming in their slender strips of bikinis, holding back handfuls of wind-tossed hair and laughing. Always laughing. Where were the tears and quarrels, and the elbowing for excessive amounts of love and space and attention? What about all those colds and tonsillectomies? Where was Molly’s stammer? Or Susan’s chronic nightmares? Not here. They sat laughing without a care in the world. At the edges of their bikinis, paler flesh showed, the faintest line of it, the only reminder of other seasons. And, oh yes, Morgan. One picture a year, taken aslant and out of focus by some amateurish daughter: Morgan in wrinkled trunks that flared around his thighs, whiskered all over, untouched by the sun, showing off his biceps and probably grinning, but how could you tell for sure? For on his head he wore an Allagash jungle hat from L. L. Bean, and mosquito netting in sweeps and folds veiled