The Dog Said Bow-Wow (19 page)

Imploringly, the phantasm held out a hand and croaked, “Food!”

I had not the least thought that any danger might arise from so miserable a source, and if I had, what would I have cared? A violent end to a violent life — I would not have objected. “Come inside,” I said to the poor fellow, “out of the rain. There’s a fire in the parlor. Go sit there, while I warm something up.”

As the beggar gratefully climbed the stairs, I noticed that he had a distinct limp, as if a leg had been broken and imperfectly healed.

I had a kettle steaming in the kitchen. It was the work of a minute to brew the tea. I prepared a tray with milk and sugar and ginger, and carried it back to the front of the house.

In the doorway to the parlor I stopped, frozen with amazement. There, in that darkened room, a hand went up and moved the hood down. All the world reversed itself.

I stumbled inside, unable to speak, unable to think.

The fire caught itself in her red hair. She turned up her cheek toward me with that same impish smile I loved so well.

“Well, mate,” she said. “Ain’t you going to kiss me?”

The fire is all but done. No, don’t bother with another log. Let it die. There’s nothing there but ashes anyway.

You look at your mother and you see someone I do not — a woman who is old and wrinkled, who has put on some weight, perhaps, who could never have been an adventurer, a rogue, a scamp. Oh, I see her exterior well enough, too. But I also see deeper.

I love her in away you can’t possibly understand, nor ever will understand unless some day many years hence you have the good fortune to come to feel the same way yourself. I love her as an old and comfortable shoe loves its mate. I could never find her equal.

And so ends my tale. I can vouch for none of it. Since the fever, I have not been sure which memories are true and which are fantasy. Perhaps only half of what I have said actually happened. Perhaps none of it did. At any rate, I have told you it all.

Save for one thing.

Not many years later, and for the best of reasons, I sent for the midwife. My darling Caroline was in labor. First she threw up, and then the water broke. Then the Quaker midwife came and chased me from the room. I sat in the parlor with my hands clasped between my knees and waited.

Surely hours passed while I stewed and worried. But all I recall is that somehow I found myself standing at the foot of my wife’s childbed. Caroline lay pale with exhaustion. She smiled wanly as the midwife held up my son for me to see.

I looked down upon that tiny creature’s face and burst into tears. The tears coursed down my face like rain, and I felt such an intensity of emotion as I can scarce describe to you now. It was raining outside, they tell me now, but that is not how I recall it. To me the world was flooded with sunshine, brighter than any I had ever seen before.

The midwife said something, I paid her no mind. I gazed upon my son.

In that moment I felt closer to my father than ever I had before. I felt that finally I understood him and knew what words he would have said to me if he could. I looked down on you with such absolute and undeviating love as we in our more hopeful moments pray that God feels toward us, and silently I spoke to you.

Someday, my son, I thought, you will be a man. You will grow up and by so doing turn me old, and then I will die and be forgotten. But that’s all right. I don’t mind. It’s a small price to pay for your existence.

Then the midwife put you into my arms, and all debts and grudges I ever held were canceled forever.

There’s so much more I wish I could tell you. But it’s late, and I lack the words. Anyway, your trunk is packed and waiting by the door. In the morning you’ll be gone. You’re a man yourself, and about to set off on adventures of your own. Adventures I cannot imagine, and which afterwards you will no more be able to explain to others than I could explain mine to you. Live them well. I know you will.

And now it’s time I was abed. Time, and then some, that I slept.

ELEANOR VOIGT
had the oddest job of anyone she knew. She worked eight hours a day in an office where no business was done. Her job was to sit at a desk and stare at the closet door. There was a button on the desk which she was to push if anybody came out that door. There was a big clock on the wall and precisely at noon, once a day, she went over to the door and unlocked it with a key she had been given. Inside was an empty closet. There were no trap doors or secret panels in it — she had looked. It was just an empty closet.

If she noticed anything unusual, she was supposed to go back to her desk and press the button.

“Unusual in what way?” she’d asked when she’d been hired. “I don’t understand. What am I looking for?”

“You’ll know it when you see it,” Mr. Tarblecko had said in that odd accent of his. Mr. Tarblecko was her employer, and some kind of foreigner. He was the creepiest thing imaginable. He had pasty white skin and no hair at all on his head, so that when he took his hat off he looked like some species of mushroom. His ears were small and almost pointed. Ellie thought he might have some kind of disease. But he paid two dollars an hour, which was good money nowadays for a woman of her age.

At the end of her shift, she was relieved by an unkempt young man who had once blurted out to her that he was a poet. When she came in, in the morning, a heavy Negress would stand up wordlessly, take her coat and hat from the rack, and with enormous dignity leave.

So all day Ellie sat behind the desk with nothing to do. She wasn’t allowed to read a book, for fear she might get so involved in it that she would stop watching the door. Crosswords were allowed, because they weren’t as engrossing. She got a lot of knitting done, and was considering taking up tatting.

Over time the door began to loom large in her imagination. She pictured herself unlocking it at some forbidden not-noon time and seeing — what? Her imagination failed her. No matter how vividly she visualized it, the door would open onto something mundane. Brooms and mops. Sports equipment. Galoshes and old clothes. What else would there be in a closet? What else
could
there be?

Sometimes, caught up in her imaginings, she would find herself on her feet. Sometimes, she walked to the door. Once she actually put her hand on the knob before drawing away. But always the thought of losing her job stopped her.

It was maddening.

Twice, Mr. Tarblecko had come to the office while she was on duty. Each time he was wearing that same black suit with that same narrow black tie. “You have a watch?” he’d asked.

“Yes, sir.” The first time, she’d held forth her wrist to show it to him. The disdainful way he ignored the gesture ensured she did not repeat it on his second visit.

“Go away. Come back in forty minutes.”

So she had gone out to a little tearoom nearby. She had a bag lunch back in her desk, with a baloney-and-mayonnaise sandwich and an apple, but she’d been so flustered she’d forgotten it, and then feared to go back after it. She treated herself to a dainty “lady lunch” that she was in no mood to appreciate, left a dime tip for the waitress, and was back in front of the office door exactly thirty-eight minutes after she’d left.

At forty minutes, exactly, she reached for the door.

As if he’d been waiting for her to do so, Mr. Tarblecko breezed through the door, putting on his hat. He didn’t acknowledge her promptness
or
her presence. He just strode briskly past, as though she didn’t exist.

Stunned, she went inside, closed the door, and returned to her desk.

She realized then that Mr. Tarblecko was genuinely, fabulously rich. He had the arrogance of those who are so wealthy that they inevitably get their way in all small matters because there’s always somebody there to
arrange
things that way. His type was never grateful for anything and never bothered to be polite, because it never even occurred to them that things could be otherwise.

The more she thought about it, the madder she got. She was no Bolshevik, but it seemed to her that people had certain rights, and that one of these was the right to a little common courtesy. It diminished one to be treated like a stick of furniture. It was degrading. She was damned if she was going to take it.

Six months went by.

The door opened and Mr. Tarblecko strode in, as if he’d left only minutes ago. “You have a watch?”

Ellie slid open a drawer and dropped her knitting into it. She opened another and took out her bag lunch. “Yes.”

“Go away. Come back in forty minutes.”

So she went outside. It was May, and Central Park was only a short walk away, so she ate there, by the little pond where children floated their toy sailboats. But all the while she fumed. She was a good employee — she really was! She was conscientious, punctual, and she never called in sick. Mr. Tarblecko ought to appreciate that. He had no business treating her the way he did.

Almost, she wanted to overstay lunch, but her conscience wouldn’t allow that. When she got back to the office, precisely thirty-nine and a half minutes after she’d left, she planted herself squarely in front of the door so that when Mr. Tarblecko left he would have no choice but to confront her. It might well lose her her job, but…well, if it did, it did. That’s how strongly she felt about it.

Thirty seconds later, the door opened and Mr. Tarblecko strode briskly out. Without breaking his stride or, indeed, showing the least sign of emotion, he picked her up by her two arms, swivelled effortlessly, and deposited her to the side.

Then he was gone. Ellie heard his footsteps dwindling down the hall.

The nerve! The sheer, raw
gall
of the man!

Ellie went back in the office, but she couldn’t make herself sit down at the desk. She was far too upset. Instead, she walked back and forth the length of the room, arguing with herself, saying aloud those things she should have said and would have said if only Mr. Tarblecko had stood still for them. To be picked up and set aside like that… Well, it was really quite upsetting. It was intolerable.

What was particularly distressing was that there wasn’t even any way to make her displeasure known.

At last, though, she calmed down enough to think clearly, and realized that she was wrong. There
was
something — something more symbolic than substantive, admittedly — that she could do.

She could open that door.

Ellie did not act on impulse. She was a methodical woman. So she thought the matter through before she did anything. Mr. Tarblecko very rarely showed up at the office — only twice in all the time she’d been here, and she’d been here over a year. Moreover, the odds of him returning to the office a third time only minutes after leaving it were negligible. He had left nothing behind — she could see that at a glance; the office was almost Spartan in its emptiness. Nor was there any work here for him to return to.

Just to be safe, though, she locked the office door. Then she got her chair out from behind the desk and chocked it up under the doorknob so that even if somebody had a key, he couldn’t get in. She put her ear to the door and listened for noises in the hall.

Nothing.

It was strange how, now that she had decided to do the deed, time seemed to slow and the office to expand. It took forever to cross the vast expanses of empty space between her and the closet door. Her hand reaching for its knob pushed through air as thick as molasses. Her fingers closed about it, one by one, and in the time it took for them to do so there was room enough for a hundred second thoughts. Faintly, she heard the sound of…machinery? A low humming noise.

She placed the key in the lock, and opened the door.

There stood Mr. Tarblecko.

Ellie shrieked, and staggered backward. One of her heels hit the floor wrong, and her ankle twisted, and she almost fell. Her heart was hammering so furiously her chest hurt.

Mr. Tarblecko glared at her from within the closet. His face was as white as a sheet of paper. “One rule,” he said coldly, tonelessly. “You had only one rule, and you broke it.” He stepped out. “You are a very bad slave.”

“I…I…I…” Ellie found herself gasping from the shock. “I’m not a slave at all!”

“There is where you are wrong, Eleanor Voigt. There is where you are very wrong indeed,” said Mr. Tarblecko. “Open the window.”

Ellie went to the window and pulled up the blinds. There was a little cactus in a pot on the windowsill. She moved it to her desk. Then she opened the window. It stuck a little, so she had to put all her strength into it. The lower sash went up slowly at first and then, with a rush, slammed to the top. A light, fresh breeze touched her.

“Climb onto the windowsill.”

“I most certainly will—”
— not
, she was going to say. But to her complete astonishment, she found herself climbing up onto the sill. She could not help herself. It was as if her will were not her own.

“Sit down with your feet outside the window.”

It was like a hideous nightmare, the kind that you know can’t be real and struggle to awaken from, but cannot. Her body did exactly as it was told to do. She had absolutely no control over it.

“Do not jump until I tell you to do so.”

“Are you going to tell me to jump?” she asked quaveringly. “Oh,
please
, Mr. Tarblecko…”

“Now look down.”

The office was on the ninth floor. Ellie was a lifelong New Yorker, so that had never seemed to her a particularly great height before. Now it did. The people on the sidewalk were as small as ants. The buses and automobiles on the street were the size of matchboxes. The sounds of horns and engines drifted up to her, and birdsong as well, the lazy background noises of a spring day in the city. The ground was so terribly far away! And there was nothing between her and it but air! Nothing holding her back from death but her fingers desperately clutching the window frame!

Ellie could feel all the world’s gravity willing her toward the distant concrete. She was dizzy with vertigo and a sick, stomach-tugging urge to simply let go and, briefly, fly. She squeezed her eyes shut tight, and felt hot tears streaming down her face.