"Here," said Emily. They had reached the front door. She pushed it open for him and held out her hand, "Goodbye," she told him. Leon grinned anxiously behind her, as if trying to ease the insult. Morgan took her hand and was startled by its lightness and its dryness.
"You don't want to be friends at all, do you?" he said.
"No," Emily told him.
"Ah," he said. "And why — would that be?"
"I don't like how you try to get into our lives. I hate it! I don't like being pried into."
"Emily," Leon said.
"No, no," Morgan told him. "It's quite all right. I understand." He looked away, toward his dusty, sagging car. He had no feelings whatsoever. It seemed he'd been emptied, "Maybe you could meet my wife," he said with an effort. "Would you like to meet Bonny? Have I told you about her? Or you might like my children. I have very nice children, very normal, very ordinary; they seem determined to be ordinary… Two are in high school. One's grown, really, a secretary; and four others are in college, here and there. Most of the year, they're gone. We hardly hear from them. But that's the way it is, right? Every parent says that. You can see that I'm a family man. Does that help? No, I guess it doesn't." It seemed he was still holding Emily's hand. He dropped it. "The oldest girl's getting married," he said. "I'm not a doctor. I work in a hardware store." Emily said, "What?"
"I manage Cullen Hardware."
"But… you delivered our baby!" she said.
"Ah, well," he told her, "I haven't witnessed three of my daughters* births for nothing." He patted all his pockets, hunting cigarettes, but when he found a pack, he just stood holding it and looking into their stunned faces. "That stabbing business, well, I read it in the paper," he said. "I presented myself untruthfully. I do that often, in fact. I often find myself giving a false impression. It's not something I intend, you understand. It almost seems that other people conspire with me, push me into it. That day you called for a doctor in the house: no one else came forward. There was this long, long silence. And it seemed like such a simple thing-offer some reassurance, drive you to the hospital. I had no inkling I'd actually have to deliver a baby. Events just… rolled me forward, so to speak." He wished they would say something. All they did was stare at him. Meanwhile a girl in an old-fashioned dress climbed the front steps and said, "Hello, Emily, Leon," but they didn't even glance at her, or move aside when she slipped past them and through the open door.
"Please. It's not entirely my fault," he said. "Why are people so willing to believe me? Just tell me that. And this is what's depressing: they'll believe me all the quicker if I tell them something disillusioning. I might say, for instance, that being a movie star is not what it's cracked up to be. I'll say the lights are so hot that my make-up runs, and there's forever this pinkish-gray stain around the inside of my collar that my wife despairs of Clorox has no effect on it; not even Wisk does, though she's partially solved the problem by prevention. What she does, you see, is rub my collar with a bar of white bath soap "before I put a shirt on. Yes, that seems to work out fairly well, I'll say."
"This is crazy," Leon told him.
"Yes," said Morgan.
"You must be crazy!" But Emily said, "Well, I don't know. I see what he means, in a way." Both men turned to stare at her. Leon said, "You do?"
"He just… has to get out of his life, sometimes," she said.
Then Morgan gave a long, shaky sigh and sank down on the stoop. "My oldest daughter's getting married," he said. "Could I sit here with you and smoke a cigarette?" 1973 The newspaper said, Crafts Revival in Baltimore? Festival Begins June 2. There was a picture of Henry Prescott, ankle-deep in wood chips, carving one of his decoys. There was a picture of Leon Meredith holding up a puppet, with his wife beside him and his daughter at his feet. He was a grim, handsome, angular man, and his mouth was sharply creviced at the corners. He was not a young boy any more. It took a photo to make Emily see that. She placed the paper on the kitchen table, pushing away several breakfast dishes, and leaned over it on both elbows to study it more closely. The porous texture of the newsprint gave Leon a dramatic look-all hollows and steel planes. Next to him, Emily seemed almost featureless. Even Gina failed to show how special she was.
"The whole idea," Leon was quoted as saying, "is improvisation. We take it moment by moment. We adapt as we go along. I'm talking about the plays, you understand-not the puppets. The puppets are my wife's doing. She makes them according to a fixed pattern. They're not improvised." This was true, in a way, and yet it wasn't. Emily did have a homemade brown-paper pattern for the puppets' outlines, but the outlines were the least of it. What was important was the faces, the dips and hills of their expressions, which tended to develop unexpected twists of their own no matter how closely she guided the fabric through the sewing machine. Yes, definitely, the puppets were improvised too. She wished she'd spoken up when that reporter was interviewing them-said something to defend herself.
"The heads are padded," Leon said, "and stiffened with some kind of sizing. My wife mixes the sizing. She has her own recipe, her own way of doing things. allowed to help with the props sometimes, but my wife insists on making the puppets totally by herself." Emily folded the paper and laid it aside. She went down the hall to the back room. It was Gina's room now. The sewing machine and the muslin bags had been moved to the room Leon and Emily shared; Gina's belongings had multiplied too far to be contained in one small corner. Her unmade bed was laden with stuffed animals, books, and clothes. In the rocking chair by the window sat a Snoopy dog bigger than Gina. Grandma and Grandpa Meredith had brought it for her sixth birthday. Emily felt it was ridiculous to give a child something that size-not to mention the cost. What could they have been thinking of? "Oh, well," Leon had told her, "that's just how they are, I guess. You know how they are." Gina was under the bed. She emerged, frowsy-haired, with a sneaker in her hand. "Aren't you ready yet?" Emily asked her. "It's time to go."