Anne Tyler
If Morning Ever Comes
1
When Ben Joe Hawkes left home he gave his sister Susannah one used guitar, six shelves of National Geographic, a battered microscope, and a foot-high hourglass. All of these things he began to miss as soon as he hit New York. He considered writing home and asking for them — Susannah probably hadn’t even listened when he gave them to her — but he figured she might laugh at him. His family was the kind that thought only children during their first summer at Scout camp should miss anything. So he kept quiet about what he missed and just dropped Susannah a postcard, with a picture on it of the UN building by night, asking if she had learned to play the guitar yet. And six weeks later he got a card back, but not the picture kind, postmarked Sandhill, N. C. , and badly rained-on. He turned the card over and learned, from Susannah’s jet-black, jerky script, that she had just changed to a job with the Sandhill School Library and was getting rich and could have her hair done every week now. She signed it “So long — S,” and then there was a P. S. saying she was going to start learning to play the guitar tomorrow. Ben Joe read this over two or three times, although what she had said was perfectly clear: she had only just now remembered that the guitar existed.
Probably she had got up in the midst of doing something else to drag it from his closet and twang the slack strings, but having discovered that she wasn’t born knowing how to play and might have to work at it awhile she had dropped it again and drifted on to something else that came to mind. Ben Joe thought about starting up a whole
string of cards — asking on the next one, for instance, whether that hourglass was still keeping time okay — until she got snappy with him and packed everything up and sent it to New York. But Susannah was flighty, like almost all his sisters, and rarely finished anything she started reading even if it was as short as a postcard; he didn’t think she would notice that he might be missing something. So he stopped the postcards and just wrote his regular letters after that, addressed to the family as a whole, asking about the health of his mother and all his sisters and saying he thought of them often.
By then it was November. He had left home late in August, just after his twenty-fifth birthday, to start law school at Columbia, and although he was doing well, even with three years of empty space behind him since college, he didn’t like Columbia. On campus the wind up from the river cut clean through him no matter what he wore, and his classmates were all quick and sleek and left him nothing to say to them. They looked like the men who modeled Italian wool jackets in men’s magazines; he plodded along beside them, thin and shivering, and tried to think about warm things. Nor did he like law; it was all memory work. The only reason he had chosen it was that it was at least practical, whereas the other ideas he had had were not, and practicality was a good thing when you headed up a family of six women. So all through September, October, and most of November he sat through Columbia’s law classes and jiggled one foot across his knee and peeled his fingernails off.
