The Matter With Morris Read Online Free Page B

Lucille discovered one of Ursula’s letters a few days after she and Morris had decided to separate. On the spring day that Lucille told him that she could no longer live with him, that their relationship as husband and wife was drawing to a close—she was so typically formal and uptight, thought Morris—they were sitting eating breakfast in the nook that had been built when Martin was three. The memory of torn-down plaster and lath, the empty hole for the large window that now looked out onto the garden. The dust and chaos and Martin wandering about, holding his toy hammer, banging ineffectually at the old lumber, imitating the workmen. Look at me. Such hope back then, no sense of needing to rehearse for what was to come. Morris had come to believe that he had failed to rehearse Martin’s death. Certainly this must have beenLucille’s method. She was prepared, like Telamon, who said, I knew, when I fathered them, that they must die. She would never be surprised. She looked up from her newspaper and, without any preamble, wondered at what point he was going to admit that he had some involvement in Martin’s death. She had raised this subject before and so the question was not unexpected. He laid down his knife, folded his own section of the newspaper, and looked at Lucille carefully. She was quite beautiful, wearing a sleeveless top that showed off the strong shoulders that he used to stoop towards and kiss. What a strange mind you have, Morris, he thought, admiring your wife, picturing yourself bending to kiss her shoulders even as she berates you. And then, suddenly, he was imagining the letterhead of some lawyer, and written beneath would be the words: “Morris and Lucille Schutt are separating due to incompatibility brought on by the anguish that arrived with the death of their son.”
    “Why are you doing this?” he said. “I know you’re desperate to explain Martin’s death, and that the simplest way to do this is to have me take the blame, but I wasn’t there, I didn’t pull the trigger. I did not kill him.”
    “I’m not saying that. You’re putting words in my mouth, Morris, just as you put words in other people’s mouths. Why haven’t you ever written a column where you told the reader that your son didn’t die during a battle, or from an improvised explosive device, but that he was shot by one of his own men? You claim to speak the truth and yet no one knows that you, the pacifist, pushed him to sign up, and that, horror of horrors, he was killed by one of his friends. But no, you’d rathertalk about roadside bombs and snipers and the heat and the sand and pretend that he died a hero, or was at least shot by the enemy and can be made into a hero. You’ve never admitted that he was killed by friendly fire. Others had to announce this. Why are you so afraid of telling people?”
    There were sparrows sitting on the feeder that hung from the lilac bush. Morris had been out earlier that morning, refilling the feeder, and he had felt, at that moment, a small sense of victory, both in himself and in the world at large, but now Lucille was ruining things. He said, his voice strained, “And what would that help? What could I possibly gain by this? I would only be hurting Tyler, a boy I’ve spoken to, as you know, and a boy you refuse to talk to. You sound so certain, as if you’re the only one who knows the truth. I’m tired of laying out my life, and yours, and Martin’s, before a bestial crowd that gorges on the personal. It’s vulgar and it’s wrong.”
    Lucille said, “I’ve thought about this a long time, and we’ve already discussed it, so it won’t come as a surprise, but I want to live apart from you for a while. I’m quite willing to move out, to find an apartment, or I can stay here. You choose. I think that Libby would like to live with me, I’ve discussed it with her, but of course you would see her as much as you like. She loves you. She’s devastated by this, but she’s