Angel in the Parlor (12 page)

It was an announcement rather than a menu, for the old man whisked out of sight and reappeared a moment later with a bottle of wine:
Schwartze Katz.
Morgon felt he ought to say something.

“Is it good?”

“Everyone likes it,” said the old man, shrugging as he yanked out the cork and poured the tailor a glass.

In the tiny kitchen, the youngest of the three women got up and hurried to the stove. His order had set them all in motion. He avoided glancing at them, but he could hear them chattering in their own tongue as they stirred and scraped and shifted the dishes about. They had interrupted their dinner to serve his.

The tailor ate slowly, aware that at last the women had sat down again and were eating exactly what he was eating, only without the amenities of clean linen and good service. Suddenly he imagined that they saw him as an eccentric, a crank, and he longed to go and sit down with them. The light outside was falling away; the woman with the child rose from the table and stood at the window, and suddenly everything flared up gold under the last look of the sun. Then the darkness dropped; the old man turned on the lights in the dining room, and the oldest woman began scrubbing a large kettle at the sink.

When did the tailor first miss his wife?

Not until he saw a strange woman washing dishes in a strange kitchen.
So it had always been, so it would always be. The man out in front, the woman in the kitchen with the child—ah, that was where the real life started. Amyas, ten years old, sits on a stool in the kitchen and talks to his mother, who is shelling peas, nodding, and listening; the window open, the warm spring air blowing through.

Morgon paid his bill and left. He did not want to go home. He walked over to Main Street and peered in the windows of the shops. It was Saturday night, it was summer, and the young people parading up and down the street gave it the air of a carnival. Standing in front of Pearlmutter's pawnshop, Morgon examined, with great interest, guns, suitcases, rings, boots, electric fans, cameras, and hair dryers. By the time his bus arrived, he felt sated. Pressing his face to the window he tried in vain to separate his own image from the passing world outside. He got off the bus and felt the first drops of a warm rain and hurried toward his building. As he passed the butcher's door he saw a little boy, barefoot, hugging himself on the stoop, smiling at him. The tailor hardly realized what he had seen until he was inside his own door and it was too late to smile back.

What were the tailor's thoughts as he lay in bed?

The room is still and nothing is lonelier than the dark.

What did the tailor see when he entered his shop on Monday?

A pile of unfinished garments in the back room. How was he going to finish everything? No kindly priest had told him the trick of reaching behind and taking one at a time, the trick of not looking back. Furthermore, he couldn't very well sit and sew while customers were knocking at the door, demanding to be fitted or to pick up their packages, or simply wanting to pass the time of day. The front room faced the world, resounded with courtesy and opinion; light flooded it from the outside and everything appeared to be under control. But now the tailor found that all this depended on the state of things in the back room, where a deep paralysis had set in. Overcome with anxiety, he closed shop on Thursday and Friday to catch up on back work. He sat in his wife's chair and lost himself in the tedious tasks that banded her life like a ring.

And what did the tailor say on Sunday when he visited his wife?

He stood at the foot of her bed, clutching his hat, staring at this woman who was almost a stranger to him. Her hospital gown gave her an antiseptic air. She seemed to have lost so much of her coarse dark hair that Morgon could almost see the outline of her skull. For the first time, he heard himself lie.

“You look pretty good, Ursula.”

Silence. She gazed at him curiously, as if she had forgotten his name. To Morgon's relief, the patients whose medicine bottles cluttered the other three night stands were gone.

“Are you comfortable here?” he asked.

“It's all right.”

“You got nice neighbors?” He jerked his head toward the next bed.

“Margery Wilkes and Norma Tiedelbaum are nice. They're downstairs with their visitors. But Mrs. Shingleton—agh, she's disgusting. Saves all her toilet paper, keeps it in her pillowcase. She's supposed to move up to the sixth floor next week.”

“Terrible,” said Morgon. Then, hesitantly. “Have you seen the doctor? Has he told you when you'll be ready to come home?”

“I will come home,” said Ursula slowly and distinctly, “when I can find someone to take my place here.”

“What!” exclaimed Morgon. “Why, there are plenty of people waiting for hospital beds.”

“Yes. But nobody willing to take my place.”

The tailor felt a little frightened, for it dawned on him that his wife was really losing her mind.

“Do you mean to say that when you're well, you can't leave the hospital? Did the doctor tell you that?”

“No,” said Ursula. She closed her eyes. “Amyas told me.”

“Amyas!” cried the tailor.

“Every night he comes and stands at the foot of the bed. ‘Amyas,' I say, ‘when will you come home?' I plead with him, Morgon. I plead with him. ‘It would take a thousand years of weeping,' he says, ‘to pay a fraction of the grief I've had to bear since my father turned me out.'”

“That's not true!” shouted the tailor. “I never turned him out. He left of his own free will.”

Ursula opened her eyes, as empty of feeling as those of fish.

What was the vision of Amyas's mother?

Amyas, dressed in a doublet of green taffeta cut like oak leaves, on a cloth of gold. He hangs like a lantern on the trees outside, his white face shining through the window.

A full moon tonight, says Margery Wilkes in the next bed.

Amyas, whispers his mother, when are you coming home?

What was the vision of Amyas's father?

Gabardine in a heap; bills to be paid; a dress form with a hole in its belly and no head or arms or legs; the orders streaming in; his wife's face. Himself dancing on a treadmill, fed by days pointed like spikes. Without undressing he lies down on his bed, closes his eyes, and sees, brilliant and strange, the mask of sickness that has come over his wife's face.

“The animal always tries to avoid the hunter. If the hunter shoots you, you lose. If you avoid him, you win.”

Ursula shakes her head but already Morgon is counting for her to hide.

“Eight! nine! ten!”

Shouldering his gun, he sets out. Trim blue jacket buttoned high at the throat, gold epaulettes, gold buttons where eagles sleep, the iron cross nestled in ropes of gold braid. Every bush shelters a victim. Far ahead of him, Amyas is running for his life, and Ursula hobbles through the underbrush after him, dragging a trap on her foot.

“Ursula, wait! The game is over!”

But the gun springs back into his hand. He pulls off the epaulettes and the iron cross, he throws his jacket to the ground. His wife does not stop running; she knows he is the hunter who will never take her alive till he runs beside her as a creature of prey.

Darkness is rolling in; at the end of Market Street you may see Pearlmutter's pawnshop.
Inside, Solomon Pearlmutter in pinstriped pants and a Hawaiian shirt, is standing at the till, counting his coins into a deerskin pouch.

Suddenly the shop bell tinkles and in limps a stocky man carrying a huge knapsack on his shoulder and a rifle in his hand. Solomon touches the pistol he keeps under the counter.

“I have here a number of things I'd like to get rid of,” says the man.

And he begins to empty the bag on the counter with ritual precision. Masks carved like fabulous animals, photographs of acrobats, broken trophies, a box of military decorations. Solomon keeps his left hand on the pistol and shakes his head.

“If I can't sell 'em, I don't want 'em. You see the kind of things I got here. Watches, rings, guns.”

His right hand waves toward a wall studded with electric guitars. Everything in Solomon's shop knows its place; the guitars stay on the wall, the pocket watches and diamond rings lie in a glass case by the cash register, the accordions huddle together in the front row, the guns hang high over the desk at the back of the store where he figures his earnings at night.

“You won't take any of them?”

The wild look that comes over the man's face makes Solomon uneasy.

“No. Sorry.”

“What will you give me for this rifle?”

“Let's have a look,” says Solomon and reaches for it.

Quick as a snake the tailor takes aim, but he does not shoot.

Long afterward, when the tailor's body had crumpled across his mind a thousand times, Solomon Pearlmutter wondered why his attacker had not taken the first shot.

When Morgon Axel awoke, he was lying in a strange bed. He tried to prop himself up on his elbows and felt as if a knife had cut and salted a deep crevice between his shoulders. Letting his head sink back to the pillow, he turned it slowly to the right and the left. An endless row of beds echoed each other in both directions, yes, and across the aisle as well, though someone had dimmed the light in this room and drawn the window shades. The only light that let him see all this came from the hall.

Those who cannot walk must fly. So Morgon Axel raised himself up until he saw his own body tucked under a blanket on the bed beneath him. But the real Morgon Axel was floating horizontally out of the ward and down the corridor, like a dandelion seed. Past closed doors, Past a green oxygen tank next to one of them. Past the vases of flowers which the nurses set outside the rooms every night.

Far ahead of him, he heard voices. A buzz, a confusion as of owls' wings, crickets' cries, pigs rooting for truffles in the woods, squirrels rolling acorns in attics. A murmur and cry of doves. Hovering six feet above the floor, Morgon grabbed the door—
Doctor's Lounge,
said the letters under his hand—and pushed himself through.

A forest was growing in the doctor's lounge. Yes, and there was a judge's bench where an old Jew sat, pounding a gavel and calling the quails to order, and a skeleton stood at one end of the bench and at the other end Amyas Axel, in green doublet and white stockings, was walking on his hands back and forth under the nose of the owlish clerk, who perched on the Jew's shoulder and saw everything. The woods were packed with spectators, rabbits and bears and deer, who lifted their heads behind the witnesses in the front row, blond Ingeborg the parson's daughter and Hans who died years ago and Heinrich who died with him; only their spiked helmets survived. And here's Otto Strauss, and next to him Frau Nolke, peeling a lapful of turnips.

When the last leaf stopped rustling, the Jew began to speak. At his first words, Morgon sank to the ground like a dead balloon.

Members of the jury, we are entering upon the last stages of this trial.
You know that we have been trying to administer justice in accord with the law. What is the administration of justice but this, that a guilty man be found guilty and an innocent man be acquitted?

Let me remind you, members of the jury, that your role is very different from mine. I sit here to see that this trial is conducted in accord with the law and to clarify to you what the law is. You have heard half a century of evidence and it is the task of each of you to decide whether the facts presented to you support the charge against this man: the failure to love. The punishment, if he is convicted, is death by loneliness.

And now let me deal briefly with the evidence of the case. You have heard the testimony of the prosecution—

(The skeleton bows; like a cardsharp, a bookie, a flimflam man, his skull is always smiling.)

—who has argued that Morgon Axel never knew what he saw and never touched what he knew but hid it in lies and loved his lies more than the naked face of truth. The face of truth is neither steady nor kind. That is why we cannot subpoena the key witness at this trial: we should have to summon everybody on earth.

(Amyas, in hobo clothes, is walking on a single strand of hair that extends over the judge's head. From an inside pocket he pulls a pair of white doves and sends them circling over the courtroom.)

The case rests on the testimony of Solomon Pearlmutter—

(Solomon Pearlmutter, subpoenaed during sleep, stands up in the front row and bows. When his wife wakes him tomorrow, he will tell her he dreamed an extraordinary dream. She will ask him what it was, but he won't remember; already herds of rabbits and quails are arming on the borders of his sleep, ready to drive his broken dream into the pit.)

—who concedes that before he shot the accused, there was enough time for the accused to take aim and fire. What you must decide, creatures of the jury, is whether Morgon Axel did indeed wish to shoot Solomon Pearlmutter or whether the accused wished Solomon Pearlmutter to shoot him, so that he might take his wife's place and put on the terrible eyesight of truth.

You have heard the defense, Amyas Axel, plead most eloquently on behalf of his father. Over the objections of the prosecution, I am admitting into this court a kind of testimony never before, I think, admitted into any court.

(Amyas, balancing on the strand of hair, takes an invisible loaf of bread from an invisible oven and slices it into baskets.

The birds take the baskets in their beaks and fly down with them to the jury and to the spectators.

Morgon Axel reaches for an imaginary slice and pulls out a real one.)

Creatures of the jury, I have nothing more to say to you. I ask you to go out and consider your verdict and tell me whether you see before you (a rustle of leaves and collars; a thousand heads turn to look at Morgon Axel leaning against the door to the forest) a man who is guilty of loving nothing but his own lies or whether you see a man who has tried to patch himself together a good life out of a bad one, and who is capable not only of love but of change. Of giving himself up to put on another man's truth.