"Did you ask him why he never sent a bill?"
"No, he wasn't really… It wasn't a meeting, exactly. I mean, he didn't see me. Well, he saw me, but it seemed he… Probably," she said, "it wasn't Dr. Morgan at all. I'm sure he would have spoken." A month or so later he followed her along Beacon Avenue. She stopped to look in the window of an infants'-wear shop and she felt someone else stop too. She turned and found a man some distance away, his back to her, gazing off down the street at nothing in particular. He might have stepped out of a jungle movie, she thought, with his safari shut and shorts, his knee-high socks, ankle boots, and huge pith helmet, Extraneous buckles and D-rings glittered all over him — on Ms shoulders, his sleeves, his rear pockets. It was nobody dangerous. It was only one of those eccentric people you often see on city streets, acting out some elaborate inner vision of themselves. She walked on. At the next red light she glanced back again and here he came, hurrying toward her with a swaggering, soldierly gait to match the uniform, his eyes obscured by the helmet but his abundant beard in full view. Oh, you couldn't mistake that beard. Dr. Morgan! She took a step toward him. He looked up at her, clapped a hand on his helmet, and darted through a door reading LU-RAE'S FINE COIFFURES.
Emily felt absurd. She felt how open and glad she must look, preparing to call his name. But what had she done wrong? Why didn't he like her any, more?
He had seemed so taken with the two of them, back when Gina was born.
She didn't tell Leon. It would make him angry, maybe; you never knew. She decided that, anyhow, it had only been one of those unexplainable things- meaningless, not worth troubling Leon about.
So it got offon the wrong foot, you might say. There was a moment when they could have dealt with it straightforwardly, but the moment slipped past them. After several of these incidents (spaced across weeks or even months) in which one thing or another prevented them from going up to the man and greeting him naturally, it began to seem that the situation had taken a turn of its own. There was no way they could gracefully set it right now. It became apparent that he must be crazy-or, at least, obsessed in some unaccountable way. (Emily shivered to think of Gina's delivery at his hands.) Yet, as Leon pointed out, he did no harm. He never threatened them or even came within speaking distance of them; there was nothing to complain of. Really, Emily was taking this too fancifully, Leon said. The man was only something to be adjusted to, as a matter of course. He was part of the furniture of their lives, like the rowhouses looming down Croswell Street, the dusty, spindly trees dying of exhaust fumes, and the puppets hanging in their muslin shrouds from the hooks in the back-bedroom closet.
Now that it was winter, business had slacked off. There had been a little burst around Christmas (holiday bazaars, parties for rich people's children), but none of the open-air fairs and circuses that kept them so busy in the summer. Emily used the time to build a new stage- a wooden one, hinged and folded for portability. She repaired the puppets and sewed more costumes for them. A few she replaced completely, which led to the usual question of what to do with the old ones. They were like dead bodies; you couldn't just dump them in the trashcan. "Use them for spare parts," Leon always said. "Save the eyes. Save that good nose." Put Red Riding Hood's grandmother's pockmarked cork-ball nose on any other puppet? It wouldn't work. It wouldn't be right. Anyway, how could she tear that face apart? She laid the grandmother in a carton alongside a worn-out Beauty from "Beauty and the Beast"-the very first puppet she'd ever made. They were on their third Beauty at the moment, a much more sophisticated version with a seamed cloth face. It wasn't the plays that wore the puppets out; it was the children coming up afterward, patting the puppets' wigs and stroking their cheeks. Beauty's skin was gray with fingerprints. Her yellow hair had a tattered, frantic look.
This whole room belonged to the puppets: the hollow back bedroom, with peeling silvery pipes shooting to the ceiling and a yellow rain stain ballooning down one wall. The window was painted shut, its panes so sooty that the sun set up an opaque white film in the afternoons. The wooden floor put splinters in Gina's knees and turned her overalls black. The china doorknob was hazy with cracks. The door hung crooked. Emily worked late in the glow of one goose-necked lamp, the hall light that shone beneath the door was not a rod but a wedge, like a very long piece of pie.
She sat up late and repaired the witch, the all-purpose stepmother-witch that was used in so many different plays. No wonder she kept wearing out! One black button eye dangled precariously. Emily perched upon the stepladder that was the room's only furniture and tied a knot in a long tail of thread.
The puppets most in use were kept in an Almade'n chablis box in the corner. They poked their heads out of the cardboard compartments: two young girls (one blonde, one brunette), a prince, a green felt frog, a dwarf The others stayed in muslin bags in the closet, with name tags attached to the drawstrings: Rip Van W. Fool Horse. King. She liked to change them around from time to time, assign them roles they were not accustomed to. Rip Van Winkle, minus his removable beard, made a fine Third Son in any of those stories where the foolish, kind-hearted Third Son ends up with the princess and half the kingdom. He fitted right in. Only Emily knew he didn't belong, and it gave a kind of edge to his performance, she felt. She ran him through his lines herself. (Leon played the older two sons.) She put an extra, salty twang in his voice. The real Third Son, meanwhile- more handsome, with less character- lay face-up backstage, grinning vacantly, Emily had never actually planned to be a puppeteer, and even now both she and Leon thought of it as temporary work. She had entered college as a mathematics major, on full scholarship — the only girl her age in Taney, Virginia, who was not either getting married the day after graduation or taking a job at Taney Paper Products. Her father had been killed in an auto accident when Emily was a baby; then, early hi Emily's freshman year at college, her mother died of a heart ailment. She was going to have to manage on her own, therefore, She hoped to teach junior high. She liked the cool and systematic process that would turn a tangle of disarranged numbers into a single number at the end-the redistributing and simplifying of equations that was the basis of junior-high-school mathematics. But she hadn't even finished the fall semester when she met Leon, who was a junior involved in acting. He couldn't major in acting (it wasn't offered), so he was majoring in English, and barely scraping by in all his subjects while he appeared in every play on campus. For the first time Emily understood why they called actors "stars." There really was something dazzling about him whenever he walked onstage. Seen close up, he was a stringy, long-faced, gloomy boy with eyes that drooped at the outer corners and a mouth already beginning to be parenthesized by two crescent-shaped lines. He had a bitter look that made people uneasy. But onstage, all this came across as a sort of power and intensity. He was so concentrated. His characters were so sharply focused that all the others seemed wooden by comparison. His voice (in real life a bit low and glum) seemed to penetrate farther than the other voices. He hung on to words lovingly and rolled them out after the briefest pause, as if teasing the audience. It appeared that his lines were invented, not memorized.