The Motion of Puppets

 

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For Bill and Luise Pugh

 

“Why did you glance back?

Why did you hesitate for that moment?”

—H.D. “E
URIDYCE
”

 

Book One

 

1

She fell in love with a puppet.

Because he was beautiful, because he was rare, because he could not be hers. Every time she passed the dusty display window of the tiny Quatre Mains storefront, she looked for him. Propped by hidden scaffolding, the puppet stood beneath a bell jar. Two black holes drilled for eyes on just the hint of a face. His smooth blank head was attached by a wooden hinge to his body, which had been hewn from a single piece of poplar, darkened by centuries, and his rudimentary joined limbs had been pierced at the hands and feet. A simple loop, worn and cracked, rose from the crown of his skull. No strings had been threaded through those holes in ages, but he was clearly a primitive marionette carved by an aboriginal Inuit craftsman long ago, the wood now riven by cracks that had opened along the grain. A thin scar ringed his chest, as though once long ago someone had been interrupted in cutting him in two. No bigger than one of her childhood dolls, just over a foot tall. The man out of time waited pensively for someone to rescue him from a glass prison. A skin of dust lay on the curve of the bell, and on a foxed paper label affixed to the bottom lip was inscribed in faded calligraphy:
poupée ancienne.

He was the lord of all the other toys in the window, all now familiar as old friends to Kay. Six dolls flanked the man in the jar, three on each side. Brightly painted with frozen smiles and rouged cheeks, their bisque faces shone in the sunshine, and they stared straight ahead, focused on the same eternal spot. They had not been played with for nearly a century, artifacts of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, with thick brocaded gowns and traveling suits, fine nests of hair piled upon their heads. Two of them brandished folded parasols, the tips as sharp as spears. A brown bear in a tatted red fez and a vest embroidered in gold filigree balanced on an iron velocipede, the fur at his elbows and knees threadbare. A hand puppet slouched next to the bear, a sad hound she recognized from the early years of children's television, its extravagantly long ears dangling to the shelf below. A lurid Punch and Judy, their garish faces bleached by the sun, grinned with their hideous mouths. Mr. Punch cocked his slapstick in hand, always ready to strike his wife. At a certain angle, she appeared to be raising her arms in defense. Odds and ends lay scattered in the shadows: a tiny troop of tin soldiers dressed in scarlet coats and bearskin hats, a pair of glass eyes with lapis lazuli irises, a half-size French horn with a lovely green patina winding through the twists and turns in the brass, and an articulated wooden snake poised to strike a heel stumbling through the grass. Behind the hodgepodge of trinkets, four black marionette horses hung from thick cords, disappearing into the rafters. In one corner of the window a cobweb, burdened with dust, stretched from wall to ceiling and below it lay the husks of two honeybees.

By all appearances, the Quatre Mains had been closed and abandoned. The display window never changed, not a thing out of place in the weeks since she and Theo came to Québec City and strolled to her first rehearsal.
Stop! Isn't this adorable
, she had said. No one ever entered or left. The door was always locked. No lights shone in the evenings or on those afternoons when thunderclouds rolled in and spat fat drops against the old storefronts lining the street. Giddy with the adventurous spirit of the newly married, Theo had once suggested that they simply break in to explore its hidden recesses. Because he had more time to go wandering away from his solitary work, he discovered that several of the antique and curio boutiques along this edge of the old part of town, the Vieux-Québec, had fallen on hard times and were similarly out of business, but his dire read of the situation did not stop her from dreaming. She wanted to hold the puppet in her hands. She wanted to take it. Not another soul was on the street, so she leaned in to look closer and pressed her hands against the dirty window. Light penetrated so far and no farther. She could only make out shapes and shadows, the promise of more. Her hot breath left a fog upon the glass, and when she saw what she had done, Kay grabbed the hem of her sleeve and wiped the patch of condensation. Ever so slightly, the wooden man in the bell jar turned his head to watch her, but she never saw him move, for she had hurried away, late again.

*   *   *

Kay had circled behind his desk and leaned over Theo, draping her slender arms over his shoulders, and clasping her hands against his heart, squeezing firmly until he raised his hands to hers. She kissed him lightly on the cheek, her long hair falling in front of his eyes, so that he felt encased by her until the moment he moved his hand and she unfolded herself and was away, always running late, trailing a string of good-byes as she departed the room, and the next sound was the door closing with a bang.

The silence after Kay left disturbed him more than the noise she made in preparing to go. For an hour, Theo had been trying to work on the translation, turning over in his mind the problems abandoned the night before, anxious to get to the solutions but waiting, waiting to be alone in the apartment so he could concentrate. He never began while she was present, not wanting to miss the opportunity to share a few words with her as she dressed or dallied over the eggs and toast they shared at three in the afternoon. Most days, she seemed barely aware that he hesitated for her, that he devoted his attentions, for she was also thinking ahead to her work, anticipating the moves that would be required of her during the show. She stretched her limbs and bent her body, and he watched from his chair, enthralled by her simple grace, turning over in his mind a particular phrase, the
mot juste,
the sound and sense of the French he struggled to turn into English. His mind in two places at once, with her and without her.

When they first came to this city, they contrived to spend as much time together as possible exploring the old French part of town. Most afternoons he would accompany her like a lovesick schoolboy, leaving their apartment on Dalhousie and winding their way to the warehouse where the company rehearsed, and he would sit with a coffee and the newspaper and watch the acts, week after week. The performers would meet there every afternoon to go over any changes to the show, and then head over to their outdoor performance space. Later, once the run of shows began, Theo would join the parade of visitors to the makeshift theater that had been set up for the season in a vacant lot underneath a highway overpass. It was a wonder to behold, the raised stage surrounded by fences and scaffolding, the arc lights and spots. Ropes hung down from the guardrails, and flying acrobats thrilled the audience by swinging out into the night sky. Small trailers served as dressing rooms, and at the back of the plaza sat a control center for all of the special effects. Most of the crowd would have to stand for the show—like groundlings at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre—but there were two portable bleachers for special guests and a small backstage area that was often crowded with performers making their entrances and exits. There he would watch from the wings night after night, anxious as she performed, until at last she excused him from the duty.

“You have work to do,” Kay had told him. “You needn't make this journey every day. You will grow bored with it. Bored of me—”

“Never,” he said.

She blushed and looked away. “You're sweet, but honestly. Work to do.”

Theo wondered if she meant more by that, if she was not somehow glad to be gone, happy to be apart for those few hours. He uncapped his pen and laid it atop a blank page and then opened the text he had been engaged to translate. The French swarmed before his eyes like thousands of bees.
L'homme en mouvement
, a strange story about a very strange man, the nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the man who studied the art of motion.

The manuscript was due to the publisher in eleven weeks, on the first of September, but Theo was only a third of the way through the translation, just at the point where Muybridge murders his wife's lover in a rage of jealousy. Muybridge had learned from their housekeeper that she had gone off to a cabin with her lover, so he loaded a pistol, left his offices in San Francisco, and raced to board the very last ferry north where he caught a train. From the end of the line, he hired a wagon to take him to the cabin far out in the country, goading the poor driver to whip the horses through the darkness. He knew his young wife was there with Harry Larkyns. When his wife's lover answered the door, Muybridge shot him through the heart.
Amour fou
. Theo considered the possibilities in English: love insane, fit of passion, fatal desire. What would drive a man to such an extreme act? Since the murder had been planned, could his behavior reasonably be called temporary insanity? If so, would not that be an equal madness guided by the same base emotion, the wayfaring heart, the obsessed mind? Crazy love, he decided, and satisfied with his choice, that was what he wrote: “He was moved by a crazy love for her. He would have done anything.”

Theo well understood how love could sway reason. Kay was just impetuous enough to have raised a doubt or two before they were married, her secret life he could not know, her sudden flights. But she made him crazy for her in the end.

A boat's horn sounded on the Saint Lawrence just outside his window, and he used the distraction to rise from the desk and check out the scene below. Flying both the maple leaf flag and the provincial fleur-de-lis, the tour boat chugged to the dock, back from Tadoussac he was sure, where the travelers had gone in search of the whales that came down the seaway every summer—the humpbacks and fins, the minkes and even, it is said, the occasional enormous blue whale, to feed on the abundant schools of fishes and krill. He and Kay had made the trip on a rare day off, and she had been entranced by the white belugas moving like ghosts in the water. Settled in by the window, he watched the crew hop out and tie off the boat and then the passengers disembark, little windup dolls finding their legs as they struggled to the gangway. Framed in a Muybridge sequence, a study of the motion of landlubbers. One by one the people down below steadied themselves, and then they escaped the edge of the picture until they were all gone, and he felt uneasy like a god above whose world had been deserted.