The Motion of Puppets (6 page)

“Careful,” Nix said. “The first step is a doozy.”

She teetered like a toddler and nearly fell to her face. For the next steps, she shuffled forward before daring to lift her foot again.

“Bravo, good show,” the walrus man said. “They call me Mr. Firkin.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Firkin. How is this all happening?”

“We come into life of our own accord. We lucky few can move about as long as the people are not watching. Midnight to first light, we are free. Well, freedom is all relative, of course. Free within the confines of the Back Room. Free to move about, talk with one another, reconnect with old friends and meet new ones. Like you.”

She remembered that there were people who would be wondering where she was. “And we cannot leave the Back Room?”

“Why would anyone ever want to leave?” Nix laughed.

“Not on our own accord,” said Mr. Firkin. “What would people think if suddenly puppets could move like ordinary folk?”

One by one, like raindrops trailing down a windowpane, the others slid off their places on the shelves and moved toward the table. The marionettes and rod puppets marched her way. The hand puppets appeared to be gliding on the hems of their cloth bodies, silent as ghosts. Some of them leapt to the floor as Mr. Firkin had done. Others climbed the legs of the table to join the rest as they surrounded her, curious, tempted but tentative. Three of the creatures, large marionettes in nineteenth-century dresses in dark formal colors, stayed behind, whispering to one another like sisters. She counted a devil, a fairy, a hag. A black man with white hair in a white judge's robe, and a white man with black hair in a black judge's robe. A rod puppet dared to touch Kay's hair and then quickly drew back her finger. A glove puppet with long ears, wide black eyes, and a sharp muzzle sniffed at her feet with his black rubber nose.

“He looks like Pluto.” She laughed.

“Well, he's not,” said Nix. “He's just an old dog who does nothing but bark and get into trouble.” On cue, the hound woofed twice and then sat back on its skirt, wagging a thin leather tail that curled at the tip.

“These are the players,” Mr. Firkin said with a flourish. “Our company.”

“And who are the giants? Where have they gone?”

None of them wanted to be the first to speak, as though they were operating on a covenant of silence. Nix shrugged his shoulders, and Mr. Firkin looked away when Kay confronted him. From their place at the back of the crowd, the Three Sisters cracked. “They are the puppeteers,” they said in unison.

“The makers and unmakers,” the wooden fairy said. “In service to the man in the glass jar.”

“Tut-tut,” said Mr. Firkin. He put a finger to his lips to silence her. “Enough of your philosophy. The man is called the Quatre Mains, the woman is the Deux Mains. They decide when you are to stay in the Back Room and when you get to be part of a show. They choose who performs, who must wait.”

“And what if I don't want to wait?” Kay said. “What if I want to go home?”

The tallest of the Three Sisters sauntered to her side and draped a thin arm over Kay's shoulders. On her sharp angular face, she wore a melancholic expression, a look of long suffering and heartbreak over the absurdity of life. She stroked Kay's face with a delicate finger. “You don't go home, dahlink. Not by your own doing, in any case. You are here for duration.”

 

5

In the alley behind the Back Room, a mockingbird was singing, trying out a few bars from a dozen different melodies, looking to impress any potential females in the area. How strange, Kay thought, to wander so far north. He might be repeating those same songs for a long, long time. The bird reminded her of her husband and how long and ardently he had wooed her, how long she had resisted. For the first time since her transformation, Kay was missing him. Not in the way she used to long for him after a few days apart, but in a deeper way, a feeling she had not had before, a realization that their destinies had changed, perhaps inexorably. The thought that he, too, might be lonesome troubled her, yet she knew that little could be done.

The bird sang on in the last of the night. Mr. Firkin stood by the door, but guarding against trespass, though he seemed more anxious about a visitor from outside than an escapee from within. Perhaps it was all for show. After they had examined her, most of the puppets returned to their tasks. Nix practiced juggling with three small heads taken from a bin of spare parts. He must have just begun to learn this new trick, for he would often miss and clumsily drop one of the wooden balls, the head bouncing across the wooden floor, with the clown in pursuit. The Russian Sisters—they had made their introductions and proved her hunch—lounged indolently nearby on makeshift furniture, sighing when the mood struck them and holding their hands dramatically against their foreheads as though stemming a migraine or an existential woe.

Beautifully carved, the Sisters were tall and willowy, adorned in long elegant gowns of crushed velvet in dark shades of mauve, aubergine, and navy blue, with high lace collars, and on their feet they wore button boots. Their long hair was pinned and coiffed in a modest style that threatened to unwind, and their beautiful faces were adorned with matching aquiline noses. Irina toyed with a strand of pearls at her neck, and Masha twirled a parasol to a rhythm only she could hear. They adored being watched, and after a time under scrutiny, Olya motioned to Kay with a languid wave of her hand to come join them.

“Sit,
lapochka,
and tell us of the outside world. What news from the mortals?” Her voice dripped, low and rich, into the air.

“How long have you been here in the Back Room?”

“Forever and a day,” Masha said.

“I do not know,” Irina said. “How long is eternity?”

Olya shot them a glance that indicated they had said too much. “Pay no attention to these mopes. They have short memories. Things were not always thus.”

“It is June,” Kay said. “Or at least it was when I arrived. The passage of time is hard to judge inside a box. We were just married, my husband and I, this past April, and we came here for work.”

“Does this marvel have a name?” Olya asked.

Unsure of the answer, Kay hesitated. “I have forgotten it for the moment, but he teaches French literature and is a translator, and I am an acrobat. A gymnast, really, but I thought it might be fun to spend the summer in Québec with the cirque.”

Irina stifled a laugh. “I'm sorry. Expectations are often thwarted by the smallest accidents.”

“An acrobat?” Masha smiled. “That will serve you well, pet, when it comes to the next puppet show. The Deux Mains adores a nimble doll. But your husband, tut. How careless of him to misplace you, to let you wander this way. Never enter a toy shop after midnight.”

Kay thought of how she had entered this space, remembering being outside the toy shop looking in. The sensation of being followed. The lights on for the first time ever and at such a late hour. A twinge in her hand reminded her of turning the doorknob and stepping into the store in her bare feet. Where were her shoes? She must have taken them off to fool her pursuer, to erase her tracks. At last, she had come so close to the man beneath the glass. Darkness arrived completely as she'd lifted the bell jar. She'd shut her eyes and then awoke to find her life in pieces. Memory, what a strange thing, not bound to any time but to a place. This box of a room, alone with these weird creatures. The Russians were smiling at her. She wondered if the Quatre Mains and the Deux Mains were nearby, in another room in the building, perhaps asleep in a bedroom in the upper story. Or tinkering below in the cellar. Or not there at all.

“Tell me about the others,” Kay said at last, shaking off the dust of her own spell.

“The old-timers,” Masha said. “Some have been here so long that they no longer have a name. Take the judges.” She gestured toward two large puppets arguing together over a chessboard. From the few pieces left on the board, it was impossible to tell who was playing black and who was playing white. “They are simply the Black Judge and the White Judge, but I can no longer tell who is whom. Do you know, Irina?”

“They were in some farce together, ages ago, and I am not sure if either knows his proper title. What does it matter? They are made for disputations.” Catching her fingers in her strand of pearls, she pointed at another pair. On the bottom shelf, an elaborately decorated rod puppet with ram's horns and a horrid black goatee, his crimson body filigreed with swirls of gold leaf inlaid in the finest teak, played at hide-and-seek with what looked like a bunch of sticks in a gossamer shirt to which had been affixed a pair of wire and lace wings. “The Devil seeks his due,” she said. “He is a foreigner, an Indonesian wayang, a minor deity of some lascivious intent, but we just call him the Devil.”

Masha called out to the girl hiding behind a spool of twine. “Hey, girl, what do we call you these days? Is it Peaseblossom? Or Cobweb? Asphodel? Or perhaps we should just call you Twiggy.”

“Get on out of that,” the girl said, angry that they had given her away. Her voice emerged from a bundle of sticks woven together in the shape of a face, and her eyes flashed like lit embers. “I am the Good Fairy, as you well know.” The Devil laughed and sprang to her at once, and she giggled in mock terror, sticks scraping on the wooden floor.

When the Devil passed by, the Dog barked, the sudden motion startling an old woman rocking on the edge of the counter, her short legs dangling in the air. At her side was the girl who had been so curious about Kay's hair, a mere waif in a rag dress, a thatch of brittle yellow straw standing up on her head, staring back at them. “The gramma is the Old Hag,” said Olya. “Don't worry about hurting her feelings by calling her so. Deaf as a block of wood.” She dropped her voice to a whisper and hunkered in close to Kay. “And the little one is Noë. Be careful, dahlink, for she is med as a hetter. I will tell you a secret. Noë has tried to make her escape many, many times, and that is why old Firkin posts himself at the door. We cannot have such madness let loose into the world.”

“And why does she want to leave?” Kay asked.

The Sisters tensed and lifted themselves from their recumbent positions, sitting up like respectable ladies. Each gave the others a knowing look, signaling a tacit agreement to let the truth alone. Masha spoke: “Who knows why anyone goes crazy? The mind invents its own miseries. I myself prefer to be the very model of happiness. And I advise you to do the same.”

Kay could not stop watching the straw-haired girl. At first she seemed merely still and self-possessed, but in time her inner enchantments began to leak out. Noë twisted her fingers together and pulled them apart. Through her thin shirt her clockwork heart beat like a dove's. In a lull in the symphony of conversation in the room, she could be heard humming to herself, not unlike the mockingbird singing in the predawn world outside.

“Come,
zaichik,
” Olya said. “And meet the Queen before the night is through.”

Taking her hand, she stepped off the edge, floating to a soft landing. Still unused to walking after such a long spell, Kay had to lean on the Russian woman's arm. Seated by the curtains dividing the Back Room from the toy store, on a throne made out of oatmeal boxes, the Queen was the most lifelike, the most beautiful of them all. Carved from tiger maple, the grain running lengthwise from brow to chin, her face and classical features were set off elegantly by a corona of jet-black hair cascading to her shoulders. Her robes were dyed pomegranate, and in one hand she held a scepter cunningly painted in shades of gold. At her feet sat a horrid creature, a green foam puppet, his misshapen head dominated by a large pair of plastic googly eyes, a primitive mishmash inspired by Picasso, the saddest face Kay had ever seen. He mewled like a kitten as she approached, covering himself under his mistress's hems.

“Pay no attention to that Worm,” Olya said. “His name is simply that, and he is more to be pitied than feared.” Five paces away, she kicked out her foot and the puppet slid farther beneath the Queen's skirts, quivering and muttering complaints. They stopped in front of her and curtsied.

“Majesty, may I present … ah, my little angel, I have forgotten your name, if I ever learned it.”

“Kay,” she said and rose to face her. “Kay Harper.”

The Queen tipped her chin in greeting.

Olya bowed as well before continuing her tale. “She is the latest sent over to us by the Original in the Front Room. Stitched and sewn by the Quatre Mains and the Deux Mains themselves in the last moon. Kay Harper comes from beyond. She is an acrobat, Majesty. A tumbler.”

“You have been on the stage?”

“I have,” she said. “Just recently in the cirque, but for some years before in both competitions and performance.”

“That will serve you well, when the time comes.”

“So I have been told.”

“If you are chosen.” The Queen corrected herself with a beatific smile. “Remember your training, and you will have many a happy time with the puppeteers. I am afraid that some of us forget how to behave.” With her toe, she nudged the squirming Worm below the throne. “You will want some opportunity now and then to play a new part. Change is everything in this place.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

The Queen bent closer, looking Kay in the eyes. “If you follow a few simple rules, all will be as it should. We are free to move about after midnight and before the first light of day, as long as we are ourselves alone. And we do not leave the Back Room and certainly never venture into the Front Room. You must not bother the toys on the other side. Live simply and know your place.”

A bell rang. From the vicinity of the beaded curtain, Firkin shook an old-fashioned school bell with great vigor and announced in a booming voice: “Time, ladies and gents. Places please. Rosy dawn is sticking her fingers in our eyes. Places. Time.”