The Motion of Puppets (16 page)

“She goes,” Marmee said. “She flies from us.”

By the alchemy of light and a puppet ghost made of the sheerest silk, Beth floated from the bed and disappeared into the rafters. The surviving Marches bent their heads to the empty bed. The lights were lowered on the tableau and lifted to Kay's spot by the door. The theater was hushed.

“Of course,” she said, “that's not how her death plays out in the novel. No deathbed contrition, no gathering of the sisters. Beth slips away quietly one night, just like that.” She snapped her fingers in sync with the puppeteer. “The book goes on, and there are even a few sequels, as if there are sequels. For Beth, the story ended. As it does for us all. There's only one ending.”

With the Quatre Mains moving her feet and the Deux Mains her arms, Kay walked to the middle of the stage, the spotlight following her. Dressed in black, the puppeteers revealed themselves, but the audience continued to focus on the doll.

“A sister, a sister … a sister lives on as long as there are those to remember her. A mother, a child, a brother, a father, and her sisters and friends. You won't forget your old aunties, will you? We can try to forgive Louisa May Alcott for the bum ride Beth got, for that rude treatment ill deserved just to make a better, more dramatic book. Because, well, in the end the writer pulled it off. Beth is still alive in us all these years later. All the Little Women made eternal through … what? A book? Art? Love? Or is it all the same?”

The light circled just her face. “No strings attached.” The audience groaned, and laughed at their reaction to the pun. For a brief second she seemed to stand there on her own, without the assistance of the puppeteers. “Are we still friends? Of course we are. Good-bye, my dears,
adieu.
” And then a quick blackout.

When the applause began, the lights went full. Deux Mains had Kay take a bow, but then she dropped the puppet, allowing her to hang limp as the other puppeteers emerged from behind the scrim. The reaction of the first night surprised her, and the acclaim continued through the whole week. Only the matinees proved more subdued, perhaps because of all the children brought by parents who thought puppets were for children or who failed altogether to read the warnings. No matter how enthusiastic, the clapping and cheers enthralled her. The puppets made their exit, spent but exhilarated, an atmosphere of fatigue and euphoria in equal measure.

After Quatre Mains and the others battened down their sets and props, the puppets rested until midnight. Replaying the performance in her mind, Kay was always surprised by the return to autonomous life, which was made even stranger by the presence of the inanimate ones, the lifeless Punch and Judy, the seven glove puppets who played the dwarfs to Noë's “Snow White and the Codependents,” and the seagull, nothing more than a children's toy. Scattered among the dead were some of her old cronies from the Back Room. The Sisters whispered together in a corner. Mr. Firkin regaled Nix with a particular moment in the show when he “had them eating out of the palm of my hand.” Kay longed for the others who had been stowed away—the Devil and the Good Fairy, the Queen and even the Worm. And then there was the curious case of Marmee, who was always hounded by the Dog backstage. Usually she kept to herself, knitting one night and unraveling her work the next, like Penelope waiting for Odysseus to return. Nearly the entire week had passed before Kay had the courage to approach her and inquire directly.

“How is it that you are alive like us?”

Marmee lifted one eyebrow and leered at her.

Kay continued, “Do I know you? You look familiar.…”

“You mean to say you don't recognize your old friend? Oh, the Quatre Mains would be so happy to know how readily and easily you've been fooled.” She laughed and hunched her shoulders and rocked on her heels. “Are you sure you can't guess?”

“Something about you reminds me of the one we called the Hag.”

“That's it!” Marmee touched the tip of a knitting needle to the side of her wooden nose. “First try, good for you. Isn't it wonderful? Aren't I marvelous? They took off my old head and gave me a new one. Freshened up the stuffing and patched me right well. I feel forty years younger.”

Kay wanted to reach out to touch her, see if she was real, but a tremor ran along her arm from fingers to shoulder. A bubble grew inside where her stomach used to be, and she felt dizzy enough to sit. “How could it be? You are still you? Not someone else, for you sure look different.”

“Looks aren't everything, chick. There's such a thing as essence. What's inside you. I've been all kinds of puppets over the years. Once I played a bawdy in a honky-tonk show, and once I was a rod puppet on a well-known TV show for children. But things change. As long as you hold on to your essence, you have everything.”

“But you were taken away with the Judges. What about the Judges? What about their essence?”

Drawn in by their conversation, the other puppets eavesdropped, curious but quiet. Marmee looked about the circle and confronted the question.

“They were unmade. You'll find what's left of them in a box of spare parts. The stuffing back in Québec. Maybe it was the Original's idea, or maybe it was a whim of the Quatre Mains. He saw no need for them any longer, so…” She clapped the dust from her hands and wiped them clean.

“You mean they are gone? For good?”

“For good, for ill, for what you will. But, yes, they are kaput. No more.”

The others seemed unfazed, accepting the finality of her pronouncement quite readily. Drifting away in twos and threes, they talked quietly among themselves. Nix cracked a joke that made Mr. Firkin laugh and then chide him with a warning of “too soon.” Puppets changing shape, disappearing altogether. Kay's notions of order were disturbed, so she found a dark corner in which to hide and contemplate and take exception to just who ruled the world.

*   *   *

Theo spent a rainy Saturday archiving all the photographs of Kay he could find. From a fat album, he scanned in their wedding photographs and then dragged a few dozen images from the social media sites she haunted. He reached into the cloud and ran off prints until the color ink faded to sketches. He plucked another hundred off an old digital camera he had forgotten about, and from his phone, he downloaded a batch from Québec, the latest, the last. Some that she had taken he had never seen, and he searched for some clues, but there was nothing. Any image from that night was locked in her phone, wherever that might be, wherever she might be. He saved what could be found to the hard drive and then made two separate backups on his portables to leave nothing to chance.

A thousand faces. A thousand memories.

They had met through friends of a mutual friend at a rooftop party in Manhattan. Kay was with a man who worked in marketing. Theo had shown up alone and was having a miserable time until he met Kay on a corner of the roof overlooking the Flatiron Building. The summer humidity dampened everyone, and she had taken off her light jacket and stood in a sleeveless blouse and skirt, her bare legs and arms alluring. With a swizzle stick, she stabbed at the lemon in her melting drink. She smote him with a smile. They were the last to leave the party.

Reaching for another tissue, he wiped his wet face and blew his nose. He was surprised at how quickly he could be torn apart. The photographs were safely preserved, at least, but they only recorded a part of her story. Kay's mother had the other pieces to the mosaic. On their trips to Vermont, she had shown him all the scrapbooks—baby's first steps, school days, the gymnastic meets all duly memorialized by newspaper clippings and faded ribbons pressed between the leaves.

“I'm sure Theo doesn't want to look through all that stuff,” Kay had said. “Don't subject him to that torture, Mother.”

“But I do, I really do,” he said. “I want to know what you were like before we met.”

Dolores flashed a triumphant smile. “Now you see, Kay. I know him better than you do. Come sit by me.…”

How long had it been since he had spoken with his mother-in-law? Two months? Their conversations had been a chore and a heartache, her questions filled with recriminations over Kay's disappearance. At first, her tone had been accusatory, looking for signs of his culpability, but in time he thought he had convinced her of his baffled grief. When he returned to the city to begin the school year, Theo tried to reassure her, despite the lack of any news. “How could you give up?” she had asked. “Why aren't you staying in Québec to keep looking for her?” He explained that he could not quit his job. Their savings had been slowly draining away, and while the college might have considered a leave of absence, the truth was he needed the distraction of the classroom. And his translation. Thank God for Muybridge.

Her latest phone call had been one long wail of grief and frustration. “Why did she ever marry you?” Anger had bubbled between Theo and Dolores from the beginning. She resented how he had taken her daughter away from her in a time of need and had intimated on many occasions that he was too old for Kay. He bristled at her interference and how quickly she could make Kay feel guilty for having, at last, a life of her own. The accident that had put Dolores in a wheelchair had changed her, or so Kay claimed. She used to be such a sweetheart, Kay would say, but Theo was not so sure. Over the months of his courtship and marriage to Kay, he tried his damnedest to be liked by her mother, since love seemed a too-distant horizon. Why did she marry him if her mother trusted him so little?

He was so lonesome that he nearly picked up the telephone to call Dolores, just to have the chance to talk about Kay with someone who knew and loved her as well, but he could not bring himself to dial her number. And there was no one else. Kay's few friends in the city had been solicitous at first, but they, too, had gone on with their lives, and there wasn't a soul in New York to commiserate.

Night fell earlier than usual. Perhaps the rain hastened the darkness. Framed in the window directly across the street from his apartment, a couple sat down to dinner, an ordinary evening. Theo watched them eat, chatting over the salads, losing steam when it was time for ice cream. She took away the dishes, and he sat at the table slumped forward, holding his head in his hands, thinking deeply about a serious matter. He did not move until she returned and laid her palm on the back of his neck, and he threw an arm around her hips, pulling her close, and rested his head against the softness of her belly. They remained in this silent embrace for a long time. When they left the dining room together, shutting off the lights, Theo rose wearily and lay on the couch in front of the television.

At two in the morning, he awoke suddenly, mildly surprised to find that he had fallen asleep during the movie. A light glowed from his desk, and seated in his chair Muybridge leafed through Theo's translation. He was shabbily dressed, his jacket threadbare at the elbows, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck, the collar frayed. A corona of white hair framed his great head, and he seemed oblivious to everything but the book in hand. Theo rolled off the couch and approached him, but the ghost did not look up. Taking a fountain pen from his breast pocket, Muybridge crossed through an entire page and then recapped the top with a click that echoed in the silence.

“Not at all how it was,” he said to himself. “The bastard Leland Stanford took all the acclaim for the pictures of that horse Sallie Gardner. As if it was his idea in the first place. Treated me like a hired hand. Me. An artist.”

“Treachery,” Theo said.

Muybridge looked at him, an aching sadness in his eyes. “Do you know Stanford published
The Horse in Motion
under his own auspices? Didn't give me the slightest credit. I had been to Paris and London and was about to present my own paper to the Royal Society. I called it
Attitudes of Animals in Motion,
and do you know what they called me? A fraud. All because of Stanford's claims. They'll believe a rich man over a poor one every time. One day you are a sensation, the next a failure. It was embarrassing, humiliating. My reputation was ruined. I should have sailed back that day and shot that son of a bitch.”

“Wouldn't be the first time,” Theo said, and then clamped his fingers over his mouth.

Muybridge scowled. “That's not a very nice thing to say.”

“My apologies.”

“Harry Larkyns was keeping private with my missus. He had it coming.”

“My remark was uncalled for. I'm sorry.”

Pulling at his prodigious white beard with his dark-stained fingers, Muybridge considered whether to forgive him. “Have you ever been married, señor? Maybe you would not be so quick to judge.”

Theo rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “I was married. Am married. But my wife is missing. One day she was here, and the next she was gone. Some people think she might be dead. Maybe you have seen her on the other side.”

“The other side?”

“Heaven … or wherever people go after they die.” He tried not to sound too optimistic. “I thought since you were dead—”

“Dead? Who said? What gave you the idea I was dead?”

“I didn't mean anything by it, but you died in 1904 while you were creating a scale model of the Great Lakes in your garden on Liverpool Road. You were seventy-four. A nice long life. I wrote the book on you. Translated it, anyhow.”

Muybridge sat back in the chair and folded his hands across his belly. “Of all the eccentric theories. You think I'm some sort of spirit, a ghost? My good man, have you considered that I might be a figment of your overwrought imagination? A hallucination brought about by a spot of indigestion. You haven't exactly been eating well since Kay disappeared, and that ham sandwich you had for your dinner—really, sir, you should always check the expiration dates.”

Theo was deeply distressed by Muybridge's reasoning. He sat back on the couch and stared at his own feet, ghostly white in the darkness, but every time he looked up, the apparition was still there.