Morgan's Passing by Anne Tyler

or taking a job at Taney Paper Products. Her father had been killed in an auto accident when Emily was a baby; then, early in Emily’s freshman year at college, her mother died of a heart ailment. She was going to have to manage on her own, therefore. She hoped to teach junior high. She liked the cool and systematic process that would turn a tangle of disarranged numbers into a single number at the end—the redistributing and simplifying of equations that was the basis of junior-high-school mathematics. But she hadn’t even finished the fall semester when she met Leon, who was a junior involved in acting. He couldn’t
major
in acting (it wasn’t offered), so he was majoring in English, and barely scraping by in all his subjects while he appeared in every play on campus. For the first time Emily understood why they called actors “stars.” There really was something dazzling about him whenever he walked onstage. Seen close up, he was a stringy, long-faced, gloomy boy with eyes that drooped at the outer corners and a mouth already beginning to be parenthesized by two crescent-shaped lines. He had a bitter look that made people uneasy. But onstage, all this came across as a sort of power and intensity. He was so concentrated.His characters were so sharply focused that all the others seemed wooden by comparison. His voice (in real life a bit low and glum) seemed to penetrate farther than the other voices. He hung on to words lovingly and rolled them out after the briefest pause, as if teasing the audience. It appeared that his lines were invented, not memorized.
    Emily thought he was wonderful. She had never met anyone like him. Her own family had been so ordinary and pale; her childhood had been so unexceptional. (His had been terrible.) They began spending all their time together—nursing a single Pepsi through an afternoon in the canteen, studying in the library with their feet intertwined beneath the table. Emily was too shy to appear in any plays with him, but she was good with her hands and she signed on as a set-builder. She hammered platforms and stairsteps and balconies. She painted leafy woods on canvas flats, and then for the next play she transformed the woods into flowered wallpaper and mahogany-colored wainscoting. Meanwhile, it seemed that even this slim connection with the theatre was making her life more dramatic. There were scenes with his parents, at which she was an embarrassed observer—long tirades from his father, a Richmond banker, while his mother wiped her eyes and smiled politely into space. Evidently, the university had informed them that Leon’s grades were even lower than usual. If they didn’t improve, he was going to flunk out. Almost every Sunday his parents would drive all the way from Richmond just to sit in Leon’s overstuffed, faded dormitory parlor asking what kind of profession he could hope for with a high F average. Emily would rather have skipped these meetings, but Leon wanted her there. At first his parents were cordial to her. Then they grew less friendly. It couldn’t have been anything she’d done. Maybe it was what she
hadn’t
done. She was always reserved and quiet with them. She came from old Quaker stock and tended, she’d been told, to feel a little too comfortable in the face of long silences.Sometimes she thought things were going beautifully when in fact everybody else was casting about in desperation for something to talk about. So she tried harder to be sociable. She wore lipstick and stockings when she knew they were coming, and she thought up neutral subjects ahead of time. While Leon and his father were storming at each other, she’d be running through a mental card file searching for a topic to divert them. “Our class is reading Tolstoy now,” she told Leon’s mother one Sunday in April. “Do you like Tolstoy?”
    â€œOh, yes, we have it in leather,” said Mrs. Meredith, dabbing