"Why aren't you at breakfast?" Morgan asked.
"Oh, I'll just wait till all this has died down."
"But then Bonny'll be in the kitchen half the morning."
"When you get to be my age," Louisa said, "why, food is near about everything there is, and I don't intend to rush it. I want a nice, hot English muffin, split with a fork, not a knife, with butter melting amongst the crumbs, and a steaming cup of, coffee laced with whipping cream. And I want it in peace. I want it in quiet."
"Bonny's going to have a fit," be said.
"Don't be silly. Bonny doesn't mind such things." She was probably right. (Bonny was infinitely expansible, taking everything as it came. It was Morgan who felt oppressed by his mother's living here.) He sighed and settled next to her on the couch. He opened out his paper. "Isn't this a weekday?" she asked him.
"Yes," he mumbled.' She crooked a finger over the top of his paper and pulled it down so she could see his face. "Aren't you going to work?"
"By and by."
"By and by? It's seven-thirty, Morgan and you don't even have your shoes on. Do you know what I've done so far today? Made my bed, watered my ferns, polished the chrome in my bathroom; and meanwhile here you sit reading the comics, and your sister's sleeping like the dead upstairs. What is this with my children? Where do they get this? By and by you say!" He gave up. He folded the paper and said, "All right, Mother."
"Have a nice day," she told him serenely.
When he left the room, she was sitting with her hands in her lap again, trustful as a child, waiting for her English muffin.
2 Wearing a pair of argyle socks that didn't go at all with his Klondike costume, and crusty leather boots to cover them up, and his olive-drab parka from Sunny's Surplus, Morgan loped along the sidewalk. His hardware store was deep in the city, too far to travel on foot, and unfortunately his car was spread all over the floor of his garage and he hadn't quite finished putting it back together. He would have to take the bus. He headed toward the transit stop, puffing on a cigarette that he held between thumb and forefinger, sending out a cloud of smoke from 'beneath the brim of his hat. He passed a row of houses, an apartment building, then a little stream of drugstores and newsstands and dentists' offices. Under one arm he carried a brown paper bag with his moccasins inside. They went with his Daniel Boone outfit. He'd worn them so often that the soft leather soles had broken through at the ball of the foot. When he reached the corner, he swerved in at Fresco's Shoe Repair to leave them off. He liked the smell of Fresco's: leather and machine oil. Maybe he should have been a cobbler.
But when be entered, jingling the cowbell above the door, be found no one there-just the counter with its clutter of awls and pencils and receipt forms, the pigeonholes behind it crammed with shoes, and a cup of coffee cooling beside the skeletal black sewing machine. "Fresco?" he called.
"Yo," Fresco said from the rear.
Morgan laid his package down and went behind the counter. He pulled out a copper-toed work boot. Where would one buy such things? They really would be useful, be felt; really very practical. The cowbell jingled again. A fat woman in a fur cape came in, no doubt from one of those new apartment buildings. All down the edge of her cape, small animals' heads hung, gnashing their teeth on theft own spindly tails. She set a spike-heeled evening sandal firmly on the counter. "I'd like to know what you're going to do about this," she said.
"Do?" said Morgan.
"You can see the heel has broken again. It broke right off while I was walking into the club, and you were the people who'd repaired it. I looked like an utter fool, a clod. "
"Well, what can I say?" Morgan asked her. "This shoe is Italian. "
"So?"
"It has hollow heels. "
"It does?" They both looked at the heel. It wasn't hollow. at all.
"Oh, we see a lot of this," Morgan told her. He stamped out his cigarette and picked up the sandal. "These shoes from Italy, they come with hollow heels so drugs can be smuggled in. So naturally they're weakened. The smugglers pry the heels off, take no care whatsoever; they don't have the slightest feeling for their work. They slam the heels back any old how, sell the shoes to some unsuspecting sbop… but of course they'll never be the same. Oh, the stories I could tell you!" He shook his head. She looked at him narrowly; faint, scratchy lines deepened around her eyes. "Ah, well," be said, sighing. "Friday morning, then. Name?"
"Well… Peterson," she said.
He scrawled it on the back of a receipt, and set it with the sandal in a cubbyhole.
After she was gone, be wrote out instructions for his moccasins: Gower. Fix! Can't live without them. He put the moccasins next to the sandal, with the instructions roiled inside. Then he trotted on out of the shop, busily lighting another cigarette beneath the shelter of his hat.
On the sidewalk his mother's dog was, waiting for him. She had a cocked, hopeful face and two perked cars like tepees. Morgan stopped dead. "Go home," be told her. She wagged her tail. "Go home. What do you want of me? What have I done?" Morgan Let off toward the bus stop. The dog followed, whining, but Morgan pretended not to hear. He speeded up. The whining continued. He wheeled around and stamped one foot. A man in an over-coat halted and then circled Morgan at a distance. The dog, however, merely cowered, panting and looking expectant. "Why must you drag after me like this?" Morgan asked. He made a rush at her, but she stood her ground. Of course be should lead her home himself, but he couldn't face it. He couldn't backtrack all that way, having started out so speedy and chipper. Instead be turned and took off at a run, holding on to his hat, pounding down the sidewalk with the dog not far behind. The dog began to lose heart. Morgan felt her lose it, though he didn't dare turn to look. He let her falter and then stop, gazing after him and spasmodically wagging her tail. Morgan clutched his aching chest and stumbled up onto a bus. Puffing and sweating, he rummaged through his pockets for change. The other passengers darted sidelong glances and then looked away again.
They passed more stores and office buildings. They whizzed through a corner of Morgan's old neighborhood, with most of the windows boarded up and trees swing out of caved-in roofs. (It had not done well without him.) Here were the Arbeiter Mattress Factory and Madam Sheba, All Questions Answered and All Problems Cheerfully Solved. Rowhouses slid by, each more decayed than the one before. Morgan hunkered in his seat, clutching the metal bar in front of him, gazing at the Ace of Spades. Sandwich Shop and Fat Boy's Shoeshine. Now he was farther downtown than he' bad ever lived. He relaxed his grip on the metal bar. He sank into the lives of the scattered people sitting on their stoops: the woman in her nightgown and vinyl jacket nursing a Rolling Rock beer and breathing frost; the two then nudging each other and laughing; the small boy in a grownup's sneakers hugging a soiled white cat. A soothing kind of emptiness began to spread through him. He felt stripped and free, like the vacant windows, frameless, glassless, on the upper floors of Syrenia's Hot Pig Bar-B-Q.
3 The downtown branch of Cullen Hardware was so old and dark and filthy, so thick with smells, so narrow and creaking, that Morgan often felt he was not so much entering it as plunging in, head first, leaving just his bootsoles visible on the rim. There was a raised platform at the rear, underneath the rafters, for his office: a scarred oak desk, files, a maroon plush settee, and a steep black Woodstock typewriter whose ribbons be had to wind by band. This used to be Bonny's grandfather's office. This store was. Grandfather Cullen's very first establishment. Now there were branches everywhere, of course. Nearly every shopping mall within a fifty-mile radius bad a Cullen Hardware. But they were all slick and modern; this was the only real one. Sometimes Bonny's Uncle Ollie would come in and threaten to close it down. "Call this a store?" he would say. "Call this a paying proposition?" He would glare around him at the bulky wooden shelves, where the Black & Decker power tools looked foolish beside the old-fashioned bins of nails. He would scowl at the rusty window grilles, which had been twisted out of shape by several different burglars. Morgan would just smile, anxiously tugging his beard, for he knew that he tended to irk Uncle Ollie and be was better off saying nothing at all. Then Uncle Ollie would storm out again and Morgan would go back to his office, relieved, 'humming beneath his breath. Not that closing this branch down would have left him unemployed; for Bonny's sake, the Cullens would feel bound to find him something else. But here he had more scope. He had half a dozen projects under way in his office-lumber stacked against the stairs, a ball-peen hammer in his OUT basket. He knew of a good place to eat not far off. He had friends just 'a few blocks over. His one clerk, Butkins, did nearly all the work, even if be wasn't so interesting to talk to.