The Motion of Puppets (17 page)

“You need to find someone to talk to,” he said at last. “Do you have anyone with whom you are especially close?”

The question drilled into him and punched a hole in his stomach. “Just Kay.”

“Obviously she's out of the question. What about your old pal Egon up in Québec? What about this Dr. Mitchell who seems to have taken an unusual interest?”

“You and I could talk.…”

Muybridge shook his mane. “That would be like talking to yourself.”

“That's all I ever do, really. It feels like I'm talking with her, most of the time. Constructing the monologue as though it is a dialogue, but part of me knows that the whole internal conversation is one-sided. She really can't hear what's going on inside my head, but I talk to her just the same, as if she somehow can hear what's on my mind. In my heart. I would be crazy to be talking to myself.”

As Theo spoke he watched Muybridge fade away, a photograph reversing the process of development. Dark areas became shades of gray, then mere shapes, outlines, and finally nothing. He was alone again. If she was out there, waiting for him to come find her, Kay would be different from the digital images in the archive, in the picture he carried around in his head, the face he saw when he talked to her. She would have changed. He went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. Many of her things were just as she had left them. Bottles and jars and creams and brushes. The yellow towels she had chosen. A red silk robe hanging from a hook on the back of the door. Looking into the mirror, he thought he would start again in the morning. Reach out and find someone with whom he might talk. Surely there was another person left in the world.

 

13

They would be going back into the boxes come morning, so the party after the final show lasted till the wee hours. Nix held court, juggling the seven dwarfs with great skill. Mr. Firkin provided the voice-over, a running patter of each name called out at the high point of the toss. Gathered around a toy piano, the Three Sisters belted out a set of show tunes, enticing the whole cast into a stirring rendition of “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from
Les Miz.
As the evening wore on, the tunes grew more maudlin, and by two in the morning, the Sisters were entwined in obscure weepy Russian songs only they knew. In her guise as Marmee, the Old Hag reunited with her dear pal, the Dog, who had recognized her at once. They spent a happy hour playing fetch with a red foam nose.

“Look at her,” Noë said. “Twenty years taken off with a new head.”

Kay considered her friend in the dim light of a corner nook. “Have you ever been changed? Got new parts?”

“Not me, sister. I've always been thus. As least since I first joined the company. Before that I was a punk in real life. Spiked hair, nose ring. A tattoo of a black rose on my hip. Me and him snuck into the Quatre Mains toy shop one night, looking for a little privacy, if you know what I mean.”

“Your boyfriend?”

Noë snorted. “You could call him that. I don't even remember his real name, he was just a boy I met at a jazz festival on the Terrasse Dufferin, and we hit it off, I guess. We snuck into the toy shop after midnight to fool around. He shouldn't have messed with that old puppet. After the change, he didn't want anything to do with me, and I felt the same. He loves it here. Guess it beats Mum and Pop back in Ottawa. Guess crawling on his belly is a better gig than busking on the boardwalk.”

At their feet a low chuckle rolled across the floor. The Worm had slithered over to eavesdrop on their conversation, and when she saw him there, Noë stomped her foot right by his head. “Go away. Shoo.”

It made such a piteous whimper that Kay nearly felt sorry for the poor thing. Inch by inch the Worm wriggled away to safety.

“So that thing has forgotten about that night with you?”

“I don't give a fig about him. He was nothing to me. I do think about my family. My parents, every day. Isn't there someone outside who misses you? Your man?”

Kay tried to recall his face, and when she could not picture him, she was filled with shame and sadness. “I was married once upon a time. A white gown with a veiled white hat, and in my arms were damask roses and calla lilies. We were outdoors by a lake and a honeybee kept swarming around my bouquet, and the groom kept swatting at it with these pathetic waves of his hand. He was trying to not call attention to the bee, trying not to embarrass me. And I can remember thinking: he should not hold himself back. Who cares what people think? Do something big. A grand gesture. Throw himself on the bee like it was a hand grenade. The guests wouldn't have minded, everybody was watching. Even the minister might have had a good laugh. And then the bee started buzzing around my veil, there was a spray of baby's breath, and still he's with the polite swats. So I just handed him the flowers and unpinned the hat and tossed it to the side. A breeze picked it up and carried it to the water. He gave me such a look. The surprise in his eyes, but I just smiled and nodded to the preacher to keep going. What else could I do?”

“You certainly didn't want to get bit by that bee.”

“One of my cousins rolled up his pants and waded out for the hat after it was all over, but I didn't care. The moment had passed for Theo.” Her eyes widened as she finally remembered. “My husband's name was Theo, and I don't think he ever got over the shock of me taking that hat off right then and there and just saying the hell with it. But it was the bees, you see, and who cares about the hat? He just didn't know me well enough; I guess you never do.”

“I'll bet he misses you,” she said. “I don't doubt that he thinks of you all the time. If I were him, I'd be looking for you still.”

Overcome, Kay wrapped her arms around Noë and embraced her. The puppet's straw hair brushed against her cheek. They sat side by side, Noë resting against Kay's shoulder, and watched the diminuendo of the cast party. The Sisters had run through their Russian repertoire and were reduced to ballads of murder and wrongdoing and Irish folk songs filled with homesickness. The rest of the troupe gathered around the piano and joined in at the longing refrains.

It felt good to be touched by another being. Theo had loved her surely, and she had loved him in return, but it all seemed so long ago, a world away. She remembered he liked to sing in the car, whiling away the long hours of a road trip, searching the radio stations for recognizable tunes. His voice was sweet and lovely, cracking in the reeds of the upper register, and plaintive and silly when he attempted falsetto. Once in a while, she would join in, and he tried to harmonize while she carried the melody. In the dying of the night, she had briefly remembered his name, could hear his voice in her head, but why could she not picture his face?

A small octagonal window near the apex of the ceiling let in the first hint of day. Mr. Firkin called for places, and the party groaned to a halt. The puppets shuffled to the positions in which they had been left the night before. Noë uncurled from beneath Kay's arm and told her, “You must promise me to never forget who you are. And if you ever have the chance to run away, just go and don't look back.”

In the darkened room an octagon of morning fell across the table, and from her spot, Kay followed the shaft of sunlight progress as the sun moved higher in the sky. It was not quite noon when the giants finally arrived. Four of them, in any case. Delacroix was gone, a temporary addition to their merry band. Finch and Stern busied themselves immediately, striking the set and lugging away the scenery and props. Back in the boxes went the puppets, segregated as before between the animate and the inanimate. Kay had been loaded into the bottom compartment as before and waited for the Three Sisters to be interred on top of her. She drank in the last of the light before the coming darkness.

“Thank God we finished when we did,” said the Deux Mains. “Delacroix was beginning to suspect.”

The Quatre Mains boomed out his answer immediately. “No, he was a clueless sprat.”

“I overheard him say something to Finch. He definitely noticed the difference among them, how easily the Sisters moved, how naturally the Dog behaved versus, say, the seagull.”

“That seagull is nearly impossible to get right. I really need to work on the wings. Perhaps another joint would make it fly more naturalistically.”

“I'm telling you, he was this close to understanding the secret of the puppets.” She held her index finger and thumb an inch apart. “You could read it on his face, see it in his hands. You can feel it in the motions of the sticks. Life of their own. Finch had to—”

“What?” Finch had reentered the room. She towered over the open box and smiled down upon the puppets. “My ears were burning, were you talking about me again?”

“Tell him,” the Deux Mains said. “Tell him your theory about Delacroix.”

Finch laid a finger against her pressed lips. “Mum's the word. He had his suspicions, but what could he say without coming across as a complete loon? That some of these dolls are alive? Or were alive once upon a time? No, that would be plain crazy. The closest he came was expressing surprise at how they moved and talked and acted. Uncanny was the word. I said it was a case of superior craftsmanship.”

The Quatre Mains stepped beside her and laid a chummy hand against her back. “Craftsmanship. I like that. Good quality construction.”

“A touch of the artist.” The Deux Mains linked arms with Finch. The trinity lovingly gazed upon the puppets as if they were looking at little children asleep in their beds. And then they sorted the rest of them into the box and closed them for the next stage of their journey. For Kay, it was like dying and being buried all over again.

*   *   *

She blushed when Muybridge asked if she would be willing to take off her clothes and be photographed in the nude. Because he was kindly, because he reminded her of a grandfather, because he was distracted and earnest, she said yes. The readiness of her answer surprised her, but she needed the money from the modeling, and she was not ashamed of her body, not averse to shaking convention. “It is for science,” he said and bowed his head slightly and fumbled with his unkempt white beard. He reminded her of Walt Whitman and Nast's illustrations of Santa Claus. “I am undertaking the greatest study ever made of the human form in motion.”

That afternoon he explained to her how the cameras worked, how they were timed to capture images in sequence that revealed subtle patterns when viewed as a whole. “You will be in good company,” he said, and then he showed her his invention to project the moving images. In a darkened studio, he played his favorites: a smiling boy crabwalking on his hands and feet, two boxers demonstrating a jab and feint, and a nattily dressed man with a straw hat taking a turn across the stage, swinging a cane, and pivoting on the point before jaunting off in the other direction.

“Such a dandy.” She laughed. “I'm afraid I have no special talents.…”

“No need to worry,” the photographer said as he turned on the lights. “We will have you do simple things, ordinary actions of the everyday. Nothing is outside the scope of my study, my desire to record. I am interested in all things human.” He spoke with such detachment that she was completely at ease before the cameras.

Theo noticed her, this young woman whose story he invented, time and again in Muybridge's
Human Figure in Motion.
Sometimes she appeared shy, hand across her eyes, her posture betraying her embarrassment. In other sequences, she could not be more natural. Seated on the floor, a white shift draped across her lap, she awaits the approach of a young girl of four or five who presents her with a small bouquet, and in the final frames, she rises to accept the flowers and kiss the child on her cheek. He and Kay had talked about children in their whirlwind courtship, but it had been no more than a passing dream, a promise for the future that now felt shattered. He stared at the woman embracing the child, the look on the model's face genuine and unabashed. It seemed to him a tenderness in a dozen images, a moment of unintended beauty in Muybridge's obsession.

“Your door was open.” The voice behind his back startled him, and he swiveled in his chair to find Dr. Mitchell, pensive and curious. “You have a visitor. Should I show him in?”

“Harper!”

Theo recognized the voice at once and was surprised to see Egon in the threshold. “I can't believe it. What brings you here?”

“You are a hard man to find. I looked for your address through all the phone books of New York.”

“You had my number. You could have called,” Theo said.

“No cell phone for me,” Egon said. “Gives you cancer of the brain. Besides, this is too important. I remembered all our talks in the evenings this summer and, of course, you are a college man, a professor, and then it becomes a matter of deduction to find you. I had to see you, so I scraped up the cash. It's about Kay.”

“Is there some news?”

Egon waved away the question and launched breathlessly into his story. “Remember telling me how your wife loved the puppet shop? After the circus closed, I had no place to stay. You and I had seen that the Quatre Mains was vacant, so I made a little home for myself in an empty room upstairs.”

“You just snuck in there?” Mitchell said. “Like a squatter?”

Laying a finger against his nose, Egon nodded. “Not so bad. Downstairs was the remnants of the toy shop, but upstairs there's an old bed, a kitchen, a kettle, running water. And I said, Egon, you are so lucky. Whoever was there skipped out in a hurry. Left half their shit behind. This will be easy as a wink. So, I settle in, keep quiet, have a place to call home. Better than the streets, eh?”

“Wouldn't you worry about being found out?” Mitchell asked.

“As long as nobody sees me go in and out, and I keep the lights out in the storefront, I am invisible.”