The Souvenir Museum

by Elizabeth McCracken

  But London was no better. Maybe he would enlist in the navy, but which one? He didn’t want to run away to join the circus: he loathed animals, and contortionists, and the sound of the whip. Perhaps he could sign back on with the crew of the QE2, and travel between countries for the rest of his life.

  In England he could drink. It was legal. That was stunning. So he did. He accompanied Lottie on gigs: a glamorous one in a fancy house on Holland Park, where Lottie stood in the foyer and people lined the stairs to watch her; a depressing one in a basement theater near Brick Lane where nobody showed up. She always had to sing her song with the parrot, “You’re My Bird.” She asked Jack to come on television with her, not as a performer but an assistant, who took the figures in and out of their cases. She could have done it herself, she always did, but she dressed him in a suit that made him look like a dummy himself. “Not a dummy,” said Lottie, “we don’t call them dummies. Ventriloquial figure.”

  One of these nights he woke up—it was dark—not in the narrow bed in the room with the mirror, but in Lottie’s bed, with Lottie. He’d not been so drunk that he couldn’t remember what had happened—it would be years before he drank like that—but he could not remember how it had begun, or whether he should be ashamed of himself.

  In the morning she was blasé at the breakfast table.

  “I hope you feel relieved,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said while thinking, No.

  “We could get married. Do you need to get married?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To stay in England.”

  “I’m English,” he said, and she laughed out loud. He had to show her his passport to prove it.

  They didn’t sleep together every night, just once in a while, and he could never tell whose idea it was, who first inclined a head for a kiss, put a hand to the other’s waist. They seemed to be operating each other’s bodies. He wondered whether she felt it, too, whether the whole world did. The Sex Act, his father had once called it in an unsuccessful conversation: in which another body compelled your body to move in a lifelike way. It was a negotiation, but you were still yourself, there in your head, more than ever, actually. There were so many things to worry about. You could never lose yourself.

  Why had she taken him in? Into her flat; into her bed (beneath which the puppets were stowed, a fact that Jack could never forget). There had to be a reason. An unhappy childhood? A child given up for adoption? She’d been beaten, she’d beaten somebody else, she’d been raised in a religion that forbid idolatry. She had a thing for teenagers. Once, in the middle of the night, he asked her.

  “Why do I need a secret to be a terrible person?” she said.

  “You’re not a terrible person.”

  No solution to the puzzle of Lottie. No solution to the puzzle of Lenny.

  Mornings, he thought about running away from running away, but where could he go? He could call his parents, who would give him the address of one of his older sisters, or some cousins—he remembered visiting an elderly person in a house in Kent when he was seven. But nobody was in London. He went out walking for hours, down Notting Hill Gate to Kensington Gardens, across Kensington Gardens to Exhibition Road, down the old Brompton Road. Everyone in London was from somewhere else. A game he invented: he would look at people, guess where they were from, then get close enough to hear them speak. Shoes and hair were the deadest giveaways. Every so often he would see a woman with a particular expression and he would know without analysis that she was American. The thrill of recognition. He would have to follow her until he heard her talk—to her companion, to a clerk in the chemist’s. In the drugstore. He was light-footed and invisible, and on this subject he was always right.

  He’d been raised by wolves, then delivered to civilization. Then, at the end of the summer, the wolves came back to claim him.

  Early September. In Ithaca, New York, his junior year in high school was about to start, but in London Jack was doing his chores, standing at the ironing board in the living room, the only space big enough to unfold it.

  “Jack,” Lottie called from the door to the flat.

  He hadn’t seen Fiona for two years, and Eloise for three. The word relations lit up in his head: what Eloise and Fiona were to him; what he and Lottie had, in a euphemism his father might have used. Did you have relations with that revolting woman. His older sisters had come to rescue him. They were grown-ups and had bank accounts. Five minutes before, he believed his problems were complicated, immense, insoluble; now he understood that every one of them could be dismissed with money. He was so delighted he’d forgotten what the situation looked like: Lottie in an emerald-green satin housecoat, he shirtless and smoking a cigarette over his ironing. Not his own shirt but a tiny blue suit for Willie Shavers. Lottie had promised him to Jack: she didn’t like Willie Shavers. You could bend emotion into the cloth puppets; Willie’s expressions were purely mechanical. Anyhow, he’d been a gift from her own mentor, a man named Shappy Marks, long dead and—said Lottie—good riddance. But not yet. Jack would have to earn him.

  “Lenny,” said Fiona, and Eloise said, “Lenny, my God, what happened to you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at you,” she said. “You’re a bag of bones.”

  “This is Eloise,” said Fiona, the kinder one, she was wearing a pink dress with red roses and her hair loose and parted down the middle. “I’m Fiona. Get your things, Len.”

  Eloise followed him to Lottie’s tidy bedroom. Jack was grateful for its orderliness. He wanted Eloise to admire it. From the top drawer of the dresser he extracted a green T-shirt, pulled it on. The bed was made. He felt Eloise study it, the paisley duvet, the two bedside tables, each with its ashtray.

  “My God, Len.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “All right is not a phrase I would use, actually,” she said. She had the accent all of the family had except him, the voice that Lottie used onstage but not at home: posh, from nowhere. Lottie’s actual accent was northern, from Manchester. That was one of the things he had learned in the past weeks. “Not any of this is all right.”

  “My stuff mostly doesn’t fit me, anyhow,” he said.

  “Leave it, then. Come on. We have to hurry.”

  Was he just going to walk out with nothing, with nobody? He dropped to the floor and pulled the case marked WS from beneath the bed and zipped it into the duffel he’d arrived with. He’d been promised, but he didn’t want to ask; he didn’t want to be refused. He swung the duffel behind his back, and it knocked into his legs, it hurt, that’s right, everything hurt, he was built of wire and wool.

  In the living room, Fiona and Lottie were sitting on the red sofa, each holding a plate with a single untouched jaffa cake. If you didn’t know, thought Jack, you would not be able to guess what the two women had in common.

  “All right?” Fiona said to them. “Going?” She handed her plate to Lottie. “Good.”

  “Wait,” said Jack. He turned to Lottie. “Do you think,” he said, “there’s a chance—could I get the extra rent back?”

  He was worried she’d get mad. Lottie didn’t have much of a temper, but she didn’t like being contradicted. She didn’t like being asked for favors.

  At this, Fiona roared.

  “You charged him rent?” she said. “You’re a grown woman!”

  The plates with their cakes, one in each hand, seemed a prank Fiona had played on Lottie to pin her to the sofa. Jack tried to assemble the right emotion for the moment—he might never see her again—and he rummaged through what he had: pity, gratitude, shock, love, disapproval, utter confusion. Her blond hair had been combed into a ponytail. He would never feel the lash of it again.

  She said, perplexed, “Well, yes.”

  Together two-thirds of Leonard Valerts’ sisters jostled Leonard Valert himself into a black cab. Where are we going? Airport. I don’t have money. Daddy’s bought you a ticket. Did he? Of course. How did you find me? Saw you on th
e telly! How was I?

  “How were you?” said Eloise incredulously. She was sitting on the jump seat, her feet resting on the duffel bag. She stared at him, then said, “You were wonderful.”

  They were so embarrassed over everything they started to tease him. Jack, they said. Jack, I’m lonely. Where’s my monkey?

  “She doesn’t have a monkey. She has a cat.”

  Darling Jack, lovely Jack, come here, I’ll stick my hand up you.

  Even Jack was laughing. It was horrible and hilarious.

  Eloise said in her fancy voice, “What I would like to know is who the fuck is Jack.”

  “Good name for a ventriloquist,” offered Jack.

  “Better name for a dummy,” said Fiona: the nice one.

  At Heathrow he opened the stolen case. He’d been so certain he would see Willie Shavers looking up at him he couldn’t made sense of it: Captain Sims, the woeful cat; how on earth did he get there? Lottie was meticulous, she said it made a difference, the figures minded where they rested, but it had been careless Jack who’d last packed them up, after a performance in Brighton.

  What was the emotion he felt? Less than loss and more than longing. He stared at the slack-jawed cat awhile then shut the case and left it in the airport men’s room. Let the bomb squad explode it. Let it linger in lost property forever.

  All the way across the ocean he dreamt of Willie Shavers, the little clicking of his mechanisms, his square shoulders, his thick wig. His slumber beneath Lottie’s bed. Jack should have known that one of them would have to stay behind.

  Thereafter, and for years, whenever he was in public—telling a story at a party, delivering a lecture to undergraduates, holding forth in a meeting—he would feel Willie Shavers, not upon him but in him: sliding glass eyes and deadpan disbelief, quirking eyebrows and carved wooden palate, even the dimple that Willie had and Jack didn’t. Even that he could feel upon his cheek. And somewhere behind him, between the small of his back and the nape of his neck (though his body had no other nape and no other small), the ghost hand of Lottie flexed, otherwise uninvolved. She operated no important part of him, nothing at the level of soul or sympathy. Just the bit that allowed him to believe that people might want to hear what he had to say. The part that let him ask strangers for their love, and not care if they said yes.

  Mistress Mickle All at Sea

  New Year’s Eve in a Rotterdam garret, the whole block blacked out, bottle rockets rattling the casements: Mistress Mickle, villainess of the children’s game show Barnaby Grudge, off duty and far from home, ate a cold canned hot dog in the dark and pronounced it delicious. These were the last minutes of the old year. She’d come from Surrey to visit her half-brother, Jonas, whom she’d last seen in Boston just before their father had retired to Minorca. Expatriation was the family disease, hereditary: thanks to an immigrant ancestor, they all had Irish passports. The world was their oyster. An oyster was not enough to sustain anyone.

  “This happen often?” she asked. “Blackouts, I mean.”

  “Off-ten?” he mimicked, then he said, “Nah. I don’t know what’s going on.” His Boston accent was thick as ever, but years in England had bent her diction, and she couldn’t decide which of them should feel superior. The blackout was in its third hour. She’d hated the darkness at first, but it had gone on so long it had become essential. Let the New Year arrive unelectrified, she thought, lit only by pyrotechnics.

  Rotterdam did not wait till midnight to celebrate; the enamel tabletop vibrated with the detonations of fireworks, explosion after explosion overhead. It was like life in wartime, if you knew nobody was dying, probably, and the privation would end by morning. She jumped at every salvo; she was a nervous woman. When Jonas fished out a joint she didn’t turn him down, though it had been decades. Maybe it would calm her. Last year she would have had a drink, but she didn’t drink anymore. She was forty-nine, Jonas forty-two, a shock. He had long, insufficient mousy hair he was trying to drum up into dreadlocks and a thick dark beard he’d trimmed to round perfection. Why couldn’t he take care of anything else so well? He was a fuckup. He said so himself. It was as though fucking up were his religion, and he was always looking for a more authentic experience of it: bankrupted by Scientology, busted for selling a stolen antique lamp, fired from an Alaskan cannery for filching salmon, beaten up by a drug dealer—that is, a ham-headed college kid who dealt ecstasy but took only steroids himself. For the past six months, Jonas had lived in this garret, renting the space beneath an Irishwoman’s kitchen table, with access to her stove and sink and toilet and, occasionally, herself. The Irishwoman had gone back to Kilkenny, would return tomorrow. Tonight her bed would be occupied by Mistress Mickle. The Irishwoman must never hear of this. Jonas’s pallet was still spread out under the table at which they now sat, his pillow at Mistress Mickle’s feet.

  At eleven thirty the lights came back on.

  “Oh good,” said Jonas.

  “A shame,” said Mistress Mickle.

  Jonas shrugged. He was a lifelong shrugger. It was the genuflection of the devout fuckup. “Let’s go to the street,” he said. “Midnight will blow your mind.”

  Outside they stood by the murky canal that ran down the street like a median strip. All along the block people set off their rockets, nearly dutifully, and gossiped and smoked. She felt the peculiar calm of not understanding the ambient language, a state she loved: it was like having part of your brain induced into a coma.

  “Just wait,” said Jonas.

  What were they waiting for? Oh yes: midnight. Mistress Mickle checked her heart the way she might reach into her handbag for a wallet she was continually certain had been pickpocketed but never was. How was her heart? There, but working? She took her pulse at her neck: steady, fine, though her torso felt percolated. She’d read an article online about women’s heart attacks, how they presented differently from men’s, how nearly anything (it seemed to Mistress Mickle) might be evidence. Was that pain in her chest, or in her back? In her chest or her breast? What bodily border must a pain cross to enter another bodily meridian? Insomnia could be a symptom, the article said: well, she had that now. She had all the symptoms, though fly-by-night versions. Intimations of symptoms. Not pains, but twinges. Not racing but trotting. She was dying, she was making it up, she wouldn’t go to a doctor. She had no natural fear of death, and was vain about this: it was what separated her from the rest of dumb humanity. But she was phobic about embarrassment. That’s what the death certificate would cite under cause: embarrassment, congenital and chronic.

  In the middle of the street, a small boy knelt beside a man with 1970s Elvis sideburns. Not father and son, she didn’t think. There was a formality: the man seemed to be the boy’s firework godfather, come from far off to teach him how to light a wick. The boy must have been eight. The man must have been a ghost. Together they held a smoldering twist of paper to the fuse and stepped away. Mistress Mickle felt the rocket’s rising shrill at the back of her throat, absorbed its pop in her tonsils. It tore itself into three red branches, then faded.

  “Fucking awesome,” Jonas called to the kid.

  “Extraordinary,” she said, in a four-syllabled, English way. Then, “Yeah, awesome.” Already the man and boy were righting the bottle for a new rocket.

  “Sixty-five million euro, according to the papers,” said Jonas. “That’s what the Dutch spent on fireworks this year. Hey, did I tell you? I’m going to apprentice to a hatter.”

  “You’re too old to be an apprentice,” she said. Then: “A hatter?”

  “Felt hats,” he said. “They’re the next thing. They’re coming back.”

  “Come and went, haven’t they?”

  He’d been smiling but his smile slipped. Then he smiled more broadly: that his sister might know anything was something he could believe for only seconds at a time. “No,” he said. “Real hats. My friend Matthias. He’s, like, a genius.”

  That perfect, round beard: it looked like a hatter’s apparatus,
come to think of it. A form for the crown of a derby, a tool to bring up the nap of the felt.

  “I’ll give you more money,” Mistress Mickle told him.

  “That’s not what I’m saying.” He had his hands in his greasy mechanic’s jacket—he who had never been a mechanic. “I don’t need your money.”

  “Oh?”

  “No,” said Jonas. “That’s why I invited you here. To show you. I don’t need you anymore. Your help, I mean. Look! I’m standing on two feet.” He added, “I think she’s pregnant. She is pregnant.”

  “Who? Oh, Irish.”

  “Siobhan,” said Jonas. “Yes.”

  “So you’ll want the money, then.”

  “Listen to me! That’s why hats.”

  “Hats,” said Mistress Mickle.

  Bickering into the New Year. Typical. They’d heard no countdown, but the turning of the calendar was unmistakable—the syncopation of bottle rockets replaced by whumps, thunderclaps, the crackling aftermath: beauty. Ordinarily Mistress Mickle was afraid of both loud noises and house fires, but the fireworks over Rotterdam—no, she realized, not over Rotterdam, the fireworks over this particular neighborhood—she goggled at them. Nobody was sighing in unison, as in the States. There wasn’t time to sigh. Every inch of the sky was stitched with flash. Fingers were being blown off, and heart attacks induced, and underneath the explosions you could hear dogs of all sizes bark in agonized registers—but how could Mistress Mickle not marvel? She’d never seen anything like it.

  She thought of the invisible woman at the science museum, that mannequin who showed her various systems through her Lucite epidermis: circulatory, nervous, respiratory, reproductive, lit up in turn. The fireworks lit up Mistress Mickle: the blond ones her nerves and the white ones her bones, the red ones her heart, the blue ones her capillaries. They cured her. She was not just fine but better. Soon they’d finish, and she’d be new. But they didn’t finish. They kept going. Cured, afflicted, cured, afflicted, cured, until she realized there was no waiting for the end. The Dutch would set them off till the dark was done. Maybe Jonas was right: maybe this was the year he’d stand on two feet. Hope saturated her.