Morgan's Passing Read Online Free PDF

his face completely.
    Now the light had reached the stairwell and sent a gleam along the banister, but the carpeted steps were still in darkness and the cat slinking up them was only a shadow, her stripes invisible, her pointed face a single spear of white. She crossed the hall floorboards without a sound. She strode to the north rear bedroom and paused in the doorway and then advanced, so purposeful that you could see how every joint in her body was strung. Next to Bonny’s side of the bed, she rose up onher hind legs to test the electric blanket—pat-pat along the edge of the mattress with one experienced paw, and then around to Morgan’s side and pat-pat again. Morgan’s side was warmer. She braced herself, tensed, and sprang onto his chest, and Morgan grunted and opened his eyes. It was just that moment of dawn when the air seems visible: flocked, like felt, gathering itself together to take on color at any second. The sheets were a shattered, craggy landscape; the upper reaches of the room were lit by a grayish haze, like the smoke that rises from bombed buildings. Morgan covered his face. “Go away,” he told the cat, but the cat only purred and sent a slitted stare elsewhere, pretending not to hear. Morgan sat up. He spilled the cat onto Bonny (a nest of tangled brown hair, a bare, speckled shoulder) and hauled himself out of bed.
    In the winter he slept in thermal underwear. He thought of clothes—all clothes—as costumes, and it pleased him to stagger off to the bathroom hitching up his long johns and rummaging through his beard like some character from the Klondike. He returned with his face set in a brighter, more hopeful expression, having glimpsed himself in the bathroom mirror: there were decisions to be made. He snapped on the closet light and stood deciding who to be today. Next to Bonny’s wrinkled skirts and blouses the tumult of his clothes hung, tightly packed together—sailor outfits, soldier outfits, riverboat-gambler outfits. They appeared to have been salvaged from some traveling operetta. Above them were his hats, stacked six deep on the shelf. He reached for one, a navy knit skullcap, and pulled it on and looked in the full-length mirror: harpooner on a whaling ship. He took it off and tried next a gigantic, broad-brimmed leather hat that engulfed his head and shaded his eyes. Ah, back to the Klondike. He tugged a pair of crumpled brown work pants over his long underwear, and added striped suspenders to hook his thumbs through. He studied his reflection awhile. Thenhe went to the bureau and plowed through the bottom drawer. “Bonny?” he said.
    â€œHmm.”
    â€œWhere are my Ragg socks?”
    â€œYour what?”
    â€œThose scratchy, woolly socks, for hiking.”
    She didn’t answer. He had to pad barefoot down the stairs, grumbling to himself. “Fool socks. Fool house. Nothing where it ought to be. Nothing where you want it.”
    He opened the back door to let the dog out. A cold wind blew in. The tiles on the kitchen floor felt icy beneath his feet. “Fool house,” he said again. He stood at the counter with an unlit cigarette clamped between his teeth and spooned coffee into the percolator.
    The cabinets in this kitchen reached clear to the high ivory ceiling. They were stuffed with tarnished silver tea services and dusty stemware that no one ever used. Jammed in front of them were ketchup bottles and cereal boxes and scummy plastic salt-and-pepper sets with rice grains in the salt from last summer when everything had stuck to itself. Fool house! Something had gone wrong with it, somehow. It was so large and formal and gracious—a wedding present from Bonny’s father, who had been a wealthy man. Bonny had inherited a portion of his money. When the children stepped through the attic floor, it was Bonny who dialed the plasterers, and she was always having the broken windowpanes replaced, the shutters rehung when