Her brother had been listening, sniffling a little, staring at the erratic monitor screens, and now he said strongly, “He had an immense reverence for life—other people’s and his own.” And he went on to describe for the resident’s benefit—the tag said “Murray” but the young doctor had introduced himself as Tom, and Morgan absently noted yet another person with a name made up of first names, like herself—their father’s relentless history of goodness. The resident submitted to the Rood.
“He sounds like a fine person,” he said weakly, as Morgan’s brother wound down.
“Yeah,” said Morgan. “He’s a real sweet guy.”
Her father’s death was so quiet that they hardly noticed until the nurses and doctors ran in from the nursing station where alarms rang when the machines flatlined. Morgan would much later be glad they were all there, surrounding him. Her mother’s tears gave way to screams, and the doctors finally had to sedate her. “How will I get by alone?” her mother sobbed. “How will I live?” Morgan understood the truth of another cliché: Morgan’s heart went out to her mother.
Goes out, gets lost, cannot find its way back
, and instead, Morgan thought:
how we all live?
One breath, one pointless breath at a time.
When the police came with the news, Morgan was first angry before afraid. One more body blow felt to start with like just a low blow, and she was at the morgue identifying her mother’s body before she realized how alone she now was. Surprisingly, considering the violence with which she had died, her mother’s face was unscarred and serene. As if she had faced death with respect.
What do you know about death and disaster?
she thought as the benevolent flock of locustlike paramedics, police, and ambulance drivers who had clustered around the barely living body, failing to save her, now made their clumsy apologies to Morgan.
What caused the event. The people on the street who materialized from nowhere and watched with detachment. The tension built
.
When it is someone you love. When it is someone who is going to die. When it is someone who dies. The tension breaks.
“Yes, that is my mother,” Morgan said, and, “I’ll call you about the arrangements.”
At the hospital where her father’s body still lay, she met her brother. He was holding the diary in which their mother had scrawled:
I can’t hold up without him. It’s too much. The babies will be alright, but I have nothing … .
Morgan spells it
all right,
edited it in her thoughts, her anger flared at the word “babies”, the idea that she and Robyn were nothing to their mother in her grief. But she saw the ruin of Robyn’s emotions in his face, and long years of training had taught her to save souls.
“It’s not conclusive,” she said. “She could have just been driving badly.”
Morgan was lying: she understood death’s appeal, but she was trapped here helping her brother stay alive. She was fairly certain her mother wasn’t so considerate.
When Morgan had the time, she would decide what she felt about that. As a rule, she suspected clichés.
After that, routine rescued them from too much thought. The police looked at the diary, but in context, in the midst of an entry that is an incoherent outpouring of raw grief, the lines Robyn had pointed out to Morgan seemed inconsequential, and they wrote “accident” on the form.
If they knew how much the insurance was
, thought Morgan savagely,
they wouldn’t be so kind
. Out of honesty, she tried to say something to the corporal, but he shook his head. “I won’t be part of an insurance investigation against a dead woman,” he said. “You’ve reported it, I’ve put it in the report—but look: it was raining, the street had oil on it, and the witnesses say she took the corner too fast. The guy in the car she just missed said she looked shocked. And your brother and you both say she wasn’t the kind to take innocent people with her. The road was crowded, and it’s pure luck that three other cars didn’t get hit. It was an accident.”
He looked at her kindly. “Don’t be angry at her,” he said. “It was an accident.”
Morgan was not so sure, but the others forced her to accept that she would never be sure.
Morgan’s aunt was the executor of the wills. She called Morgan and Robyn to her crochet-intensive home to read them the instructions.
“Dear, please don’t play with those.”
Morgan put down the blown-glass poodle she was examining and turned to her aunt, expecting her next to offer cookies and milk. No such luck.
“Of course these bits don’t apply:
if my wife should predecease me—
here’s the gist of it. He left it all to her except the sentimental bequests: here’s a list. It’s your mother’s will that matters to you now. She left you the house in town, Robyn, but of course she left Constance the other place.”
“Other place?” Morgan looked at Robyn but he was equally puzzled.
“The old house. It’s been empty since last fall. She had it rented to a religious group, you know.”
“Auntie,” said Robyn, “what are you talking about?”
“Oh,” said their aunt, blushing faintly, “I forgot. She never told you. It’s the place her mother left her, but there was never any money, of course. She hated it, anyway. It’s where the school was.”
“School?” It transpires that their grandparents, of whom they have been told little, had founded, and operated for a period of some years, a private charter school located in an old, historic mansion gone to seed, in the prairie city west of theirs. Her mother had now left this house to Morgan.
“I spent five years at university in Edmonton, paying rent, and she had a
house
there?”
“It’s not a house per se, my dears. It’s more of a … mansion. The church people’s lease was for twenty years, anyway.”
“She doesn’t say a word all our lives, and now she leaves it to
me?
”
“She thought you might make something of it. She was talking to me about it just after your father died, you know.”
“So she was planning this.”
Her aunt was shocked. “Oh, you must never say that, dear. Such a terrible accident would never be her choice. She wanted to tell you about it finally. I convinced her it was the best thing. Whatever we felt, children deserve to know about their family history. But I suppose it doesn’t matter now, really. What matters is that there is no tenant. It’s perfect. You can sell it right away and buy something better.”
“No,” said Morgan. “I need a place to live. That will do as well as any.”
In the darkness the night before the funeral, contemplating the deaths of her parents, Morgan was suddenly bathed in light: icy, blue, fluorescing with meaning: an invisible light coldly revealing to her that she was wrong. She had been wrong about almost everything. About her parents, about Vik, about her name, herself, her brother … Only in her work had she found and held to the truth. Asam waited tonight for his surgery, Morgan waited for her parents’ funeral—but it seemed she was scheduled for surgery too.
Under the relentless light of truth she was prepared by a wash of dread, made naked, wheeled to her own judgment. The surgeon whose knives would flay her was either the unfeeling cosmos or her own broken spirit, finally ready to admit defeat. Exposing under the relentless light of the operating theater the gargoyle face of Morgan’s soul, peeling back the skin to reveal the deformities, the failures of structure.
Vik, the slightest of those. Some friends are not meant to be lovers. Morgan, knowing this much sooner than Vik, should have given her the courtesy, if nothing else—good manners, if not love—of the truth. But Morgan had lied to herself, said, I can expect no better: my passions are not realizable—and because of that lie had waited years for Vik to get sick of the deficits and find anger, with that anger to prise herself from Morgan’s ruthless charity.
From a childhood adoration which had been boundless and unassailable, Morgan had grown in adulthood to despise her father for being good. Why is good hated, and by what? Good is hated by failure, by evil, by despair because it cannot be sullied. Morgan hated him for being successful at kindness, where she always failed, and so she had let him slip away without telling him the central and more real truth, that she loved him desperately and that his kindness had kept her alive.
What Morgan had seen as neurotic, unhealthy, soft these last few days, responding to her suspicion that it was her mother’s unbelievable preference to run her car into a bridge rather than stick around to do what was expected of her, to live, Morgan now understood to simply be love: love for a simple man who chose not to be intellectual from a simple, strong, quiet woman. The yielding she had seen as his frailty was his strength, a strength Morgan didn’t have, had never had; her mother’s grief was the artifact of that same love, and Morgan had mocked it. Now she saw her own smallness instead.
The surgeon of the Universe is relentless and in this cold night she welcomed that decisive cautery. It did not occur to her to seek a second opinion, a more kindly practitioner who might have told her that extremities of grief are not always the best spotlights on the truth. Instead, she felt freed of all her unsavory attachments, like a conjoined twin whose other half is finally cut away.
Through her father’s long dying she had thought like one of the machines which tended him. She had responded to his last, tender conversations (that saying-of what-had-to-be-said imperative) but not wholeheartedly: she had chosen to be safe: safety was petty in the face of the absolutes, but she had valued it more. Through her mother’s great grief and loss Morgan had stood in judgment, thinking cool irritated thoughts about over-dramatization, about excess: reacting with ego to the realization that her mother prized her father over her children: unwilling to believe that such a great grief could exist, because unwilling to accept the love underlying it.
If I could love someone like that, Morgan groped her way to understanding, I could feel that; as it is I can only scorn it. She felt grubby and dishonest. She imagined that her mother, after death, had heard her crabbed, sour thoughts and had had one more source of grief: her daughter’s betrayal.
I am sorry,
Morgan offered up uselessly—while she believed in the wheel, she didn’t believe her words mattered now. Only what she did and withheld: her love withheld, her intense belief that her mother and father were the pillars of the Universe—and finally, held back in denial for all those wasted years of distance, she had come up to and accepted the grave catalog of her stupidity, ignorance, and cruelty.
Her name was part of the betrayal she had lived. In the world, she had always gone by Connie, Constance, but she was not constant. She was withholding, fluid, elusive, evasive. She had come over the years to a state where she gave nothing which cost her anything. Everything came from the surface and nothing from a loving heart, a heart which could love.
I will not be Constance, a constant lie, any more,
Morgan thought, and she turned to the name by which she had often thought of herself, her secret central name, Morgan, the name of the witch who betrayed. If in the depths of magic there was a true-hearted Morgan le fay about whom the Christian world had constructed a lie, our Morgan had not met her yet.
She thought of herself as the witch, thought of who the witch was: a sour, twisted, externally beautiful sorcerer who used the flesh of others for her binding spells, who fucked her brother Arthur: Morgan has not imitated her with Robyn in the bodily sense of the word, but now decides she had in the old slang sense
fucked him over
. By being that elder sister and not loving him as she could have, she had withheld something vital, some heart of love without which he grew into less than he could have. For a moment she saw how it could have been, her arm around the small body instead of holding him apart: the gifts she could have given him of protection, of song, of support, of acceptance: instead he had been blinded, blanded by his unimportance, had sought out insignificance and tried to live inside the lines. Perhaps even if she had tried he would have slipped away into mediocrity—but she didn’t try.
It took more time to record these reassessments in her journal than it did to have them. Morgan started by crying, but she immediately condemned the impulse as false, the tears as crocodile tears—as false as her grief, which seems only the costume of a vast disinterest. She had the right only to desolation until she learned to love those she kept at arm’s reach. She was empty and shorn of illusions. In an older time she would have cut her hair to accept it, and gone on, but she kept her desolation instead as a kind of secular penance—she didn’t think that word because she was not from that Roman Catholic tradition, even from any Christian tradition which would exact penance. She felt instead remorse: a vast repetitive wasteland of remorse, wheeling like an Einsteinian curved universe to surround her every way she looked, except one thin path back to Asam, the only being she had properly—that is to say objectively, unselfishly—loved, even a little, on the face of the whole earth.
In the years with the gargoyle children, symmetry had been the goal of countless observed surgeries, and Morgan’s cold epiphany was in this tradition. She did not question it, or the breakage needed to effect it. She would have to leave here, find a place where she could do no harm, where perhaps she could learn to improve a little eventually. Tomorrow after the funeral she would go to see Asam one last time, and before she could betray him (she knew this as a conceit, and easily upturned into another betrayal—that of desertion—by a certain acrobatics, but she can’t see another way) she would say goodbye. Then she would take her inheritance—born of the love of others—and use it to try to make recompense, living in the daily memory of her failure to understand.