12  

MORGAN LLEWELLYN, OF COURSE. Although for someone left as much in the dark about my past as Grace, there was no “of course” to it, unfortunately. More like a plaintive owl hoot “Who?”

In desperation I set out to explain that the prizefighter was not me but my late brother Casper “the Capper” Llewellyn, onetime lightweight champion of the world, and Rose was not my wife but his, and therefore merely my sister-in-law—“You must believe me, Rose is the sort who would sign ‘Forever Yours’ on a Montgomery Ward catalog order”—and that certain unforeseen circumstances back in Chicago had made it imperative for me to change my name. With interruptions accompanied by Grace’s furious scratching, the story came out in fits and starts. Even so, she soon enough grasped that a fixed championship fight, the gambling mob’s wrath that did in Casper, and the necessity for Rose and me to flee together to Montana were involved.

When I was finished, or at least out of words, the woman I had never wanted to hurt looked at me in a heartbreaking way. “Morrie, you are a magnet for trouble,” she despaired. “If all this happened a dozen years ago, why are the gamblers still after you?”

“Long memories and short tempers.” I thought it best not to add that a suspicious World Series bet worth a junior fortune was enough to stir both of those.

My hopes went up while she deliberated as if to herself. “I can understand that much, I suppose.” Butte as well as Chicago certainly held examples of such behavior, after all. Then, though, she spoke with more agitation than even hives could bring about. “But to marry me under”—was I imagining, or did the red of her eyes increase like the glow of coals as she sought the most damning phrase—“false pretenses! Who am I supposed to be, let alone you, with a phony name that I’m not even sure I can spell?”

“I, ah, apologize for the discrepancy,” I gingerly tried soothing her. “But people alter names all the time.”

“Oh, really? Since when, impostor?”

“Since, well, let’s say Mark Twain. It is well known he was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, and if that doesn’t constitute an alteration—”

“Morrie, he was a writer,” she said through her teeth, “of course he made things up. I’m talking about honest citizens.”

“Then what about a vice president of the United States?”

“Now you’re telling me that pickle-puss Calvin Coolidge is not actually Calvin Coolidge?”

“I’m not prepared to speak to that,” I backed off markedly. “I refer to an earlier officeholder—Henry Wilson, who served under the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, 1873 to 1875, I believe the dates were. The poor man began life as Jeremiah Jones Colbath. So, you see, there is precedent for improving on one’s given na—”

“I see, all right. And I don’t care what some forgotten mucky-muck back in the time of Useless Grant called himself, what matters to me is the husband I thought was Morrie Morgan but who turns out to be Morgan Llewellyn, if he is even telling the truth about that, and with a price on his hide besides.” Tear tracks glistened on the calamine mask of her face. “I never expected life with you to be all strawberries and cream. I went through enough with Arthur to know a marriage isn’t like that. But to find out that you’re not at all who I thought you were—” Her voice trembled and broke. “Why couldn’t you have told me before now?”

“Because I was afraid of something like this.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t forgive you?”

“You could start now,” I said hopefully.

“Ooh, you. Morrie, I can’t take it,” she moaned. “I cannot live with someone who goes through life like, like”—she scratched more furiously than ever—“a chameleon on a barber pole.” As ominously as I could hear them coming, her next words hit me worse than blows. “I’m going back to the boardinghouse. You can have your mansion and your shenanigans and your names, and see if I care.”

•   •   •

The door-banging commotion of her departure drew Sandison out of his book-lined stronghold, the drumbeat of boots preceding the familiar bulk and beard into the drawing room where I waited despondently for the next round I was bound to lose. Before he had time to do more than scowl at me, Griff and Hoop appeared behind him, suitcases in hand.

“Um, uh,” Griff stammered, and could manage no further utterance.

Hoop croaked out: “What he means is—”

“I know,” I acknowledged the valises they were holding as guiltily as robbers making a getaway.

“It’s nothing against you, Morrie,” they practically chorused.

“That’s welcome news.”

“We’re sort of attached to Mrs. Morgan, is all.”

“Understood.”

“We aren’t taking sides, you know.”

“Of course not.”

“It’s not for us to judge whose fault it is when a woman walks out on a man or anything.”

“Just go.”

“Righto.”

They shuffled to the door. “It’s been nice, Mr. Sandison.” He grunted in response as they gimped out to join Grace at the boardinghouse.

“The last two rats on the ghost ship, are we?” Sandison rumbled in the oppressive silence of the house. “What did you do to the poor woman, Morgan?”

“Nothing that can be corrected without going back in history, I fear,” I said in agitation, pacing back and forth on the Turkish rug.

“That bad, hmm?” He crooked a finger for me to follow him into the library. “What a shame. I liked that Grace,” his words kept after me as the desk chair groaned under his bulk. “Reminded me of Dora. Had a mind of her own. Not every woman does.” No, mainly the ones who repeatedly tossed me in the reject bin. Rose and Grace. Womanhood unbridled, when it came to my efforts to be a reliable mate in life. Caught up in self-pity as I was, it took me a moment for Sandison’s change of tone to register and stop me in my tracks. “Tell me,” he was saying quietly, “the whole thing.”

I did. My true name. The fixed-fight scheme, when Casper yielded his lightweight championship of the world—“Just parking it until the return bout,” he reasoned—that worked all too well. The unabated fury of the Chicago gambling mob after it figured out we had won a fortune betting on the opponent. My beloved brother’s long walk off a short pier into Lake Michigan, as the gamblers took their revenge and looked around for more. The pose of Rose and myself as sister and brother in our Marias Coulee concealment, her as a housekeeper and me as teacher in the one-room school. My impulsive return to Montana after nearly ten years’ absence, only to become enmeshed in the 1919 chapter of struggle between the miners and Anaconda and thence shadowed incessantly by company goons suspicious of my identity. Even I had to admit, it added up to quite a story. If confession was good for the soul, mine should now have been so freshly scrubbed it shone.

Stroking his beard like a pet, my listener said not a word until I was done. “Gamblers. Bad company,” he tch-tched, the man who had sent people swinging from the end of a rope for looking sideways at his cows. He heaved himself around in his chair to face me directly. “Back there in ’19, I wondered why you rated goons trailing you around more than anyone else in this demented town.”

“Yes, well, at least that pair of imbeciles long since departed Montana for the sake of their health. As prescribed by the Wobblies, whom they were managing to annoy when they weren’t after me like bloodhounds.”

Sandison eyed me thoughtfully while I awaited whatever wise counsel he could offer to a wifeless, overworked, underpaid editorialist operating under an alias beyond an assumed name. Instead, what I received was:

“Morgan? ’Twixt thee and me, you don’t happen to be this Highliner character, by any chance?”