IN APRIL OF 2001, a little over three months after his father died, Morgan rented an apartment on Cumberland Court, in the Crescent Hill section of Louisville. It was the second floor of a frame house, and at the back, off the kitchen, was a miniporch, where he often sat, reading, tending his hibachi, gazing in the direction of Lucy’s house, on the next street over. Pieces of Lucy’s house—three lots to the left—were visible through a tall sycamore that a man named Jerry sometimes sat under in the evening. Jerry had a straw-colored flattop and he would sometimes scratch it when he wasn’t tipping beer into his mouth; then he would look at his fingers to see what, if anything, he’d raised. He smoked 100-mm cigarettes and often coughed between puffs. Morgan knew the man’s name was Jerry because a woman would sometimes call to him, telling him to come to dinner or get the phone or go buy her a fly strip because she’d never seen so many flies in her life, they were all over her kitchen, damn it, Jerry. She had a voice that was like something that had gotten loose from a coop, a voice that would have scared children and solicitors from the yard, but it hardly budged her husband. Jerry sat in his green metal chair under the sycamore, and contemplated the fading daylight, the dusk, the darkness gathering in the grass that his big white feet grazed in.
Sometimes Morgan stayed on his porch past dark, by which time Jerry would have shambled off to his supper or his TV or perhaps the Last Stop, a tavern on Frankfort Avenue where Morgan had recently had a beer with the Reverend Sandy Broyles. When dark fell, when lightning bugs began to speckle the air and bats flew out from hiding places to swallow whatever was so foolish as to be still airborne, certain pieces of the house where Lucy lived became more visible. It was as if the house, a slumberous, wasp’s-nest gray, had awakened from a long afternoon’s nap. The windows, depthless black holes by day, lighted up. With his naked eyes, which were hazel and hyperopic, Morgan could see five windows, four in the lower rear half of the house, which Lucy occupied, and one above, winking through the branches of the sycamore. One of Lucy’s windows was the frosted, bathroom kind, and blinds or shades were often pulled over the others, so what he could actually see of the interior of Lucy’s house was nothing more than the odd shadow. Most nights Morgan had to content himself with studying simple squares of light, which left him to consider the alternative of going inside his own apartment to read or wash dishes or dance with himself as he listened to Al Green or clean Mr. Jet’s kitty litter or call his son in New York or write the first chapter of his memoir about his father. Once, on a beautiful, warm early June evening when Morgan had been drinking bourbon and was in love with the entire Commonwealth of Kentucky and all the clovery breezes that blew through it, he thought he saw a man at one of the windows on the first floor (the blind was up). Morgan had then gone inside to get his binoculars. Even though he’d never set foot in Lucy’s apartment, even though he’d practically had to beg her to go to dinner with him, he had come to regard her as someone to watch over. He felt he owed it to his father to look after her, this tallish lawyer-bachelorette. It was wrong, he knew, to spy on her, but he couldn’t help it. His hands trembled a tiny bit as he focused the binoculars, which he’d bought in New York to take to sporting events but had also used for illicit purposes, especially after he and his wife had broken up. When he got a bead on the window, he saw Lucy, a mug of something in her hand. She stood stock-still, as if fixed in the frame of the window. He could swear that she was looking straight at him and could see clear through the lens of the binoculars into his head, which was empty except for a man treading in the black pool of his desire.
BACK IN MARCH, before Morgan had left New York, his mother had called and said, “We’ll fix up Dad’s basement room and you can write your book down there.”
“I don’t think that would work, Mom,” Morgan had said. He was watching a miniskirted woman and her skin-and-bones greyhound turn the corner. With his binoculars, he’d once found this woman on her apartment sofa, eating a bowl of globby pink stuff. It was amazing what people ate when they were alone.
“Or you could put your computer and whatnot in Crawford’s room and sleep in your own. You’d have the run of the upstairs. I have a lot of my old summer dresses in your closet, but Ida can move them. We’ll find a place somewhere. Which reminds me. Do you think you’ll want any of Dad’s suits? Some of them are quite handsome, you know. I can get Mr. Witkin over here to alter them if you think you’ll want any of them. You can try them on when you come down.”
Morgan said, “I don’t have many opportunities to wear a suit, Mom.” He owned a single dark one, his wedding suit, and he hadn’t worn it to his father’s funeral. He remembered that Mr. Witkin, who was short and gruff and had eyebrows that looked like slashed-on chalk marks, had come to the visitation and had said, as if his mouth were even then full of needles, “Fine, fine man your dad was. My sympathy.”
“He has some nice seersucker ones,” she said.
“We’ll see,” Morgan said. When he attempted to express his true thoughts to his mother, they came out fluttery and thin, like moths doomed to expire in lamplight.
“When do you think you might move in?” his mother had asked.
MORGAN SPENT ABOUT ten days at his mother’s place before he found the apartment on Cumberland Court. Morgan had brought little with him from New York—clothes, hibachi, laptop, Mr. Jet, binoculars, boom box, a waffle iron given to him by Uncle Louis and Lazaro—and so he had to furnish his apartment with things from his mother’s house. She gave him some retired sunroom furniture—two wicker chairs and a love seat. In the basement, they’d uncovered his boyhood desk, the red rolltop, into which he’d rashly carved the initials of a girl who dropped him a few weeks later, and into which Crawford had carved “Morgan bites.” From his father’s basement office, he took the daybed, which had served as a catchall for railroad books and timetables and mail and photographic equipment and Christmas candy from courthouse cronies and tennis balls and years-old dividend checks. Once, while idly pawing through the stuff on the bed, Morgan had come across a black-and-white glossy of his father shaking hands with President Nixon. It was taken at the White House, in 1973. Morgan’s father was wearing a mussed raincoat and a camera was slung over his shoulder and his graying hair stood up on the back of his head like a clump of wild grass. He was smiling broadly at Nixon, whom he had voted for three times, whose sagging, glum face seemed to be asking, “How’d this yokel get in the door?”
From his mother’s kitchen and pantry cabinets, where several sets of flawless bone china were stored, no plate of which had had anything edible on it for decades, if ever, Morgan had taken some dining car dishes issued by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad company back in the days when trains were the way to travel. He also took some coffee mugs (one had scripture on it, another he had drunk iodine-flavored milk out of when he was a child) and a set of four tall, ribbed inky-blue glasses, which used to appear on the dinner table in the summers, filled with mint tea.
“I always loved these,” Mrs. Dupree said.
“You don’t want me to take them?” She had glasses by the dozens, all now for one mouth.
She wrapped them in bubble plastic for him.
She gave him her coffee percolator and a gateleg table to eat off of and some bathroom supplies, including monogrammed towels and a toilet plunger. You never knew when you’d need a plunger. She had an extra, from the time when her husband had a bleeding spell following a bladder operation and he’d tried to flush his safety diapers down the toilet. Actually, the plunger belonged to her neighbor Gerald Boardman. Gerald had come running with it when she’d called, when she couldn’t find her own. Bloody toilet water had swamped her bathroom. Crawford had been there that weekend. He’d reported to Morgan that their mother had been hysterical. Crawford’s wife and Gerald had handled the sanitation problem. Crawford had driven his father downtown to an emergency room and stayed with him until five in the morning, when he was admitted to the hospital proper.
“I don’t think Gerald would mind if you borrowed his plunger,” she said. “He came over in his pajamas that night, you know. Did I tell you that he offered to take me to the orchestra next week? We both have season tickets. But I said no, I didn’t think I could make it. Dad’s been gone for barely three months. It seems too soon. What do you think?”
“I don’t think Dad would mind if you went to the orchestra with Gerald Boardman.”
“They are playing Beethoven. I don’t know.” She was looking into her husband’s medicine cabinet. “Is there anything from here you want? His brush? Epsom salts you probably don’t need. Baby powder? Look at all this baby powder. Styptic sticks? Probably not since you don’t shave anymore.”
Morgan took the brush. It still had some of his father’s hair in it.
HE PUT THE BINOCULARS back in the case, on the gateleg table, where Mr. Jet lay, with his black nose next to the blue picnic-size Morton’s salt dispenser. Morgan had given up trying to keep Mr. Jet off surfaces where humans ate and prepared human food. Mr. Jet was a pasha who lay where he pleased. When Morgan and Gina had divided up things, about two years ago, she had claimed Mr. Jet for William, their son, who had named Mr. Jet (shortened from Mr. Super Amazing Black Blazing Jet, which he once was, before he became middle-aged and sedentary) and had slept with him many of the nights of his childhood. It had been decided that William would spend the bulk of his time with his mother, but William said he didn’t want Mr. Jet at his mother’s house. When Morgan had asked his son why, William had shrugged and gone into his room and put his ears under headphones. Later, his mother bought him a dog.
The phone rang. Morgan went into the bedroom to get it. He thought it might be his mother and then he thought it might be Lucy calling to tell him she was going to report him to the police for peeping. Didn’t she wear those serious black-rimmed glasses through which she couldn’t miss seeing other people’s flaws? At dinner with him the other night, their first and only date, which was over at ten sharp, she had removed her glasses while eating her appetizer and he saw under her eyes places darkened by doubt and worry. She saw him peering at her, and before the main course arrived, she put her glasses back on.
The phone, a pale blue Princess model, rotary style, from the downstairs guest room in his mother’s house, rang seven times before he picked it up.
“You motherfucker,” a woman’s voice said. “I should’ve killed you when I had a chance and put you out on the lawn for the vultures to sup on. Except they would have died from food poisoning in about ten seconds, you miserable chickenshit shithead. And I have economic concerns.”
Didn’t she mean “ecological concerns,” Morgan wondered, while searching his memory for a match to the voice. It was not his ex-wife’s. It was a slightly twangy voice, a Kentucky voice, though the diction (“sup,” for instance, and “lawn” instead of “yard”) was a little on the urbane side. He didn’t recall any girls from his youth here, on the banks of the Ohio River, who talked quite like this, none whom he might have so offended that she’d call him thirty years later to fill his ear with obscenities. And then he remembered that at Kroger’s the other day, near the dairy case, he had bumped into a woman who had told him that she was Sarah Gilbert, who had been his girlfriend for a few months in tenth grade. She didn’t look much like the girl he had talked to about Siddhartha. She looked as if she’d slipped through the cracks; her face was puffy. She’d told him she was divorced and unemployed. Sarah clearly had “economic concerns,” but her voice, though twangy, was unlike the caller’s. Sarah’s voice was soft, like sawdust, like defeat.
“Unlike you, you rich prick, you son of a fucking judge, with all your lying bullshit about how you’re going to take care of me and my baby—or should I say your baby who’s going to have about zero chance if you don’t live up to your promises, you lying shithead.”
“Who is this?” Morgan finally said.
In the past, Morgan or his brother had occasionally been confused with the son of a judge named Sackrider. Morgan and Crawford and Peter Sackrider had, to make things even more confusing, all gone to the same school for boys, a place of much hilarity and little learning. Morgan, whom an older boy had dubbed Morgan Le Fay when Morgan was in the sixth grade, became known in the upper grades as Your Honor, mostly because he was a good student. Crawford was sometimes referred to as Judge D’s Lesser and Messier Spawn. Sackrider was sometimes addressed as the Dishonorable Pete.
But it wasn’t really plausible, was it, that the caller was confusing Morgan with some other son of a judge? Maybe she had said “you son of a fucking noodge,” though it seemed unlikely that Yiddish would be among her languages. Or maybe she’d said “son of a fucking drudge.” Which, granted, would have been an odd choice of epithet.
“Who is this?” the woman’s voice mocked. “It’s the angel of death, brainless.”
She clicked off. Morgan backed away from the phone. He was standing in darkness, except for the light that came from the kitchen. He’d been living alone for some time now, and he had almost become accustomed to finding himself in unlighted rooms, wondering what next to do with himself. On occasion, in his New York apartment, he’d gone into the bathroom and undressed and masturbated in front of the full-length mirror. “I’m being kind to myself,” he said once, to Mr. Jet, when the cat had walked in and given him an inquisitive look. This was not so long ago, about a month after his father had died. William had just returned to Gina’s house, after spending the weekend with Morgan. It was the bottom of winter. New York was frozen and mean, steel and concrete and hard piles of dog turds and people who would snap at you if you brushed against them. Morgan’s apartment smelled like burned waffles (dinner), the wind rattled the early-twentieth-century windows. He had put aside his book—the Handbook for Judges: An Anthology of Inspirational and Other Helpful Writings for Members of the Judiciary—that he’d found among his father’s office possessions, and gone into William’s room to look at his things. For some reason, he didn’t turn on the light. William’s things emerged as the darkness peeled back. Morgan saw the behemoth Macintosh that was William’s “away” computer. He saw the unmade bed, a turmoil of sheets and comforter and pillow and stuffed animals that had accompanied William out of childhood into the swamp of adolescence. He saw the bookshelves, which were half empty, because his son had taken his favorites with him to his mother’s house. He touched the basketball jersey hanging on the back of the desk chair—it was a Ray Allen, number 34, shiny white with purple trim, almost as elegant as an ecclesiastical garment; Crawford had sent it to him—which he wore as a night shirt. Then Morgan left William’s room and sat down and resumed reading an article by Judge Learned Hand. Then he got up and went and stood naked before the bathroom mirror.
Now, here in the Crescent Hill district of his hometown, he got down on the floor and did twenty-seven sit-ups and twelve push-ups, the modified kind, where you lift yourself from your knees instead of your toes. Then he went into the kitchen to make coffee. Mr. Jet still had his nose flush against the Morton’s salt dispenser. Morgan said to Mr. Jet, “What is the equivalent in the cat world to somebody you don’t know calling you up to say that she’s the angel of death and you’re a motherfucker? Can you tell me that?”
He rinsed out the percolator. When he’d told the young woman at Java Jimmy’s that he needed his French Sumatran ground for a percolator, she said, “Wow, that’s way retro.” The percolator wasn’t calculated old-fashionedness. It was just what his mother had pressed on him, along with his father’s seersucker suit, which now hung, in need of some tailoring, in his closet, next to his father’s home-court robe. (Once or twice, he had considered wearing the robe around the house like loungewear, but then he’d thought, No, that would be too weird.) On the other hand, he was, despite the long hair and the beard and the pink pearl in his ear, somewhat conservative in his tastes, maybe even a little stuffy. He didn’t like the music his son filled his ears with—hard, banging, tuneless, hip-hop jibberish. There was no joy in it, you couldn’t dance by yourself to it, it wasn’t about love or heartbreak, you couldn’t hum it while brushing your hair with your father’s brush that your mother had bought from the Fuller Brush man thirty years ago.
His son would be here in a couple weeks, at the end of June. He’d stay until mid-July. Morgan hadn’t figured out what they were going to do. William was almost a teenager. His voice had recently fallen from above his soft brown eyes to a dark, echoing passageway in his chest.
Morgan leaned against the refrigerator and listened to the percolator perk. It was like the sound of rain being sucked upward out of the earth—time in reverse. He remembered that his mother—or Ida, if she was there, which she usually was—had always perked coffee for the bridge and dinner parties she gave when Morgan was a boy. The percolator would sit on a silver trivet on a lowboy in the dining room. Bone china cups and saucers would be arranged alongside, like a fleet of sailing ships, with a silver pitcher of cream and a fluted silver bowl of white sugar cubes, which were otherwise hidden under lock and key. (The sugar that Morgan and Crawford were allowed to put on their morning wheat germ and shredded wheat were brownish crystals, which Morgan imagined to have been mined from rocks rather than extracted from cane.) At these parties, Morgan and Crawford were required to shake hands with all the guests, and, after they did, after they’d waded through the clouds of cigarette and pipe smoke and the queries and the comparisons (“Your brother’s just shot up, hasn’t he?”) and jokes (“You all look so much alike you could pass for brothers!”), they would go upstairs to their separate rooms or go into the kitchen to see Ida and try to talk her into giving them an extra dessert, which, for occasions such as these, were made with regular white sugar. Sometimes, later in the evening, Morgan would pinch a sugar cube or two and sit on the stairs and listen to the conversations in the so-called living room, which, when the party was over, would revert to being a museum for antique furniture. He would hear bids of three clubs and four hearts and cries of dismay or glee and men talking about Eisenhower or Kennedy or the damn Democrats or the damn Russians and he would hear his mother and her friends talking about an art exhibit in Chicago or a dress bought at Byck’s or the Reverend Alfred Lloyd Broyles Sr. over at St. John’s having to bail his sexton out of the drunk tank. Sometimes Morgan sat there for a long time, waiting for the moment when his mother would begin to discuss him and his brother. But it would be worth the wait, because he, Morgan, the younger child, who did so well in school and was so well behaved, always came out on top. Morgan would hear a woman named Hildegarde Gray say in her voice that had originated somewhere south of Louisville, that was composed of equal parts of cotton and sugar, “You have the most darling children, Mary Louise.” To which Mrs. Dupree would reply, “If you only knew about Crawford’s temper.” Or, “They’re darling, but my older one can be so difficult sometimes.” And then she would tell some long story, which, if you were a listener, was like traveling a back road that kept looping off somewhere, veering away from a destination that was possibly not even on the map, until a voice, always a male one but not Morgan’s father’s, would say, “It’s your lead, Mary Louise.” The Duprees weren’t often paired together at the bridge table, at least not when Morgan was eavesdropping. It was rare that Morgan heard his father’s voice at all. He had the impression his father was concentrating on his cards or thinking about a legal problem or an upcoming railroad trip in which he would ride for hours in the vestibule with the window open.
Morgan sat down at his childhood desk with the scripture-emblazoned mug (Matthew 10:42) of black, sugarless coffee (half decaf, half not). Above the desk was Uncle Louis’s painting of a steam engine pushing through smoke and hazy impressionist light, the one that had hung for years in Morgan’s father’s basement office. The picture made Morgan think about time and extinction, though the light was a solace.
He turned on his computer. In his files was a document called “Dad: Chapter One.” He clicked on it. Those three words were the sum total of the so-called document, which, until Morgan had given in to computers (he was a latecomer), he’d thought of as a tactile thing, like an old letter, say, that smelled of love or sweat and could inflict a cut if the paper hadn’t gone too soft around the edges. He’d found such things in the drawers of his little childhood desk. One was a Putt-Putt scorecard (he’d beaten Crawford); another was a scrap of paper with Don Ameche’s autograph (his mother had gotten this, on a train, in 1959); another, on fake parchment, was a dollar-fifty reproduction of the Declaration of Independence, which he’d bought at Monticello when he was a boy; and another was a Valentine from his father.
Morgan stared at the blank document on his screen and then he took his father’s Valentine out of the drawer. It showed a sheepish man in rags setting his immense thumping heart at the feet of his lady love, who peers at it through a lorgnette. The caption inside read, “Please accept this token of my affection.” Below, in his peculiar script that always seemed in danger of going horizontal, that looked like a big wind had swept through it, his father had written, “To Morgan. With love, Guess Who.” Morgan had received the card in 1964, when he was almost thirteen. His father had mailed it, from downtown Louisville, the postmark on the envelope showed. He would also have mailed a card to Crawford. Morgan smiled at the idea of his fourteen-year-old brother, the sullen boy who had carved “Morgan bites” into the top of this desk, finding in the mail a Valentine from their father, who would be home that night to ask Crawford how he’d done on his Latin test and to tell his wife that he’d reserved two sleeping car compartments for their Easter vacation trip to Florida.
Morgan stared at the blank document on his screen and then he went outside to the porch with his coffee. He wished that he could see his father’s former law clerk climbing over backyard fences and crossing property lines to reach him, to inform him that she would stay with him all night and tell him everything he wanted to know about his father.