Angel in the Parlor

by Nancy Willard

  In the house next door, the West Bavarian Singing Society met twice a week, and on those evenings Morgon Axel could not study. Rich joyful voices flooded his silence, and he opened his window to hear them.

  Über’s Jahr, über’s Jahr, wenn me Traübele schneid’t,

  Stell’ i hier mi wied’ rum ein;

  Bin i dann, bin i dann dein schätzele noch,

  So soll die Hochzeit sein.

  He leaned on the sill and looked out. Across the street on the sixth floor of a tottering building, an aged dancing master was teaching young women in bloomers and tights the intricacies of the pirouette and the entrechat. From his window, Morgon Axel could plainly see into theirs. A war is going on, he thought, and people are still dancing as if Germany meant nothing to them.

  Sitting down at his table once more, he tried to consider the width of the collar on Captain Hess’s uniform but found himself staring vacantly at his own face on the mirror of the wardrobe. It was a warm September night. Under the linden trees, the officers were walking, yes, those officers over whose flesh his fingers had walked miles and miles, gathering pleats and folds on the way. He got up and slipped into the uniform of Captain Hess. Slipped into the sleek trousers and longed-for boots. Buttoned the blue jacket across his chest, fastened the belt, and stood barefoot in front of the mirror. And then stepping out of the bar reserved exclusively for commissioned officers, he leaned on the windowsill and looked up at the figure of a single girl dancing by herself. Perhaps she knew that Morgon Axel was watching. What was the good of military regulations, of drills and marches, if it couldn’t protect you against longing to be free? Captain Morgon Axel would send someone to fetch her, but that wasn’t the way. The next night, another would take her place.

  One evening Morgon noticed the studio was dark; no one ever danced there again, and shortly afterwards the singers, too, disappeared. For the next three years he lived on Frau Nolke’s turnips and O. Strauss’s chocolates (courtesy of his customers), which the old gentleman hoarded shamefully. A young lieutenant, being fitted for a cloak, told Morgon that he had bought all his Christmas and birthday presents for the next year, though it was only March, so that if he were killed in action, his family and friends would know he hadn’t forgotten them. A captain from Bremen, who lisped in honor of the Kaiser and wore a monocle, ordered six pairs of Hessian boots, because, he explained, a soldier should live at all times in his boots. He was modeling his conduct on Frederick the Great who kept his hat and his boots on even when he was ill, rose at four every morning, and in the evening played the flute for recreation. Both the captain and the lieutenant left their photographs for O. Strauss to hang on his wall and both were killed at Soissons.

  But one clear night in November, Kaiser Wilhelm fled into Holland. What was to be done? The Imperial Army marched grimly back to Berlin, passing through the Brandenburger Tor. Wreaths crowned their helmets, and they carried a new banner: “Peace and Freedom.” Morgon Axel wept and applied for passage to America, taking with him one fur-lined cape (Army surplus), one suit (much worn), and seven animal masks which his father had willed him; there was nothing else left, and Morgon Axel was the sole heir.

  Now look at him, middle-aged, still short and rather stocky, a square figure, in a tweed hunting jacket with absurd shoulder pads, standing in the doorway of his tailor shop on Cherry Street, Germantown, New York.

  Wait. You must give an account of the years in between.

  The evidence for those years has been lost, except for some brief scenes, undated, by which we may only surmise that he worked as a tailor in New York City and married Ursula Rincetti, daughter of an Italian cabinetmaker and restorer of styles past.

  Now Morgon is sitting in the tiny apartment where he lives with his wife and his son, Amyas, aged twelve. Christened Hans Federico but nicknamed Amyas by a young English girl who worked in the Germantown bank auditing accounts and occasionally babysat with Amyas and held him in her arms and sang him to sleep with an old song:

  You and I and Amyas

  Amyas and you and I.

  To the greenwood must we go, alas!

  You and I, my life and Amyas.

  It is spring. Or summer. Or any season. What you will. Morgon is sitting in front of the television set, watching the “Ed Sullivan Show.” Morgon Axel has the only color television on the block. He is admiring the red sequined suits of the dancing couple, “who have recently played at the Copacabana.” There is a Copacabana in Los Angeles—but it is another Copacabana which concerns us here, just as it is another Sunset Strip, another Hollywood, another Las Vegas and Broadway that we are speaking of, rather than the ones generally known. Long hours of watching television and films have rebuilt these streets in Morgon Axel’s head like a stage setting, deficient in details but peopled with a cast of thousands. Captain Hess and General Ludendorff and Colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck have given way to Roy Rogers and Gene Autrey and Fred Astaire. Sometimes Morgon watches the talent show on the Albany station, “Stairway to the Stars,” and as the young people sing, tap-dance, and play the piano, it is Amyas he imagines, leaping on a trampoline and being discovered.

  For Amyas is talented that way, no doubt about it. He has that grace which Morgon so marveled at when he shouldered the weight of Captain Hess’s uniform one night in Berlin and saw, in the opposite window, a young girl dancing. Once a week Amyas studies gymnastics and trapeze acrobatics with Taft Toshiho in Yonkers, who also teaches judo to secretaries and housewives. Amyas and the six other boys in his class have already performed in high schools and Kiwanis clubs around the state and at the Ulster County Fair. It’s only a matter of months, says Morgon to his friends, till you’ll be seeing Amyas on television. On Broadway.

  “Tell me about how it was when you worked in the theater,” says Amyas. He is five years old and his father sits on the edge of his bed, waiting for his son to go to sleep.

  “Well,” says Morgon Axel, “the shows are not worth mentioning compared to the fêtes. Before the war, such fêtes! I remember one fête I designed for the Count of Ansbach-Schwedt.”

  And as he speaks, he sees himself very clearly standing on a balcony in the castle of the count, surveying the garden and the woods beyond, brilliant with thousands of lanterns.

  “All the guests came in hunting costumes. I designed over a hundred masks like the faces of animals, no two exactly alike. The women put on the masks and the men had to hunt for their partners in the forest.”

  The next morning there is no forest, only the shop, which is small and untidy. The front room contains two mirrors, a few chairs, bolts of wool and gabardine, catalogs and swatches spread open on a table, and a rack of finished garments which barely hides a dressmaker’s dummy. In the window Morgon drapes remnants of silk over a truncated plaster column. On the walls hang his masks and his guns. That’s the front room, where the tailor receives his customers.

  But there’s another room behind it, separated from the first by a red curtain. Sybil, the tailor’s golden retriever, lopes back and forth between them like a messenger. Customers waiting for their packages can hear the tailor’s wife stitching and sighing behind the curtain. Also, the clicking of Sybil’s toenails against the bare floor; they have grown long from lack of exercise, for though the tailor dreams of hunting and has his dog and his guns all ready, he seldom finds the time.

  Why do you say nothing of Ursula, the tailor’s wife?

  Searching the tailor’s memory, we find that up till now she passed through it as through water, leaving no footprints. A dead civilization which shapes what we are though we will never know what it is.

  Nevertheless, give us a picture of the tailor’s wife.

  Why, when the customers slipped through the curtains for their fittings—the tailor had built a tiny dressing room here—they saw sitting under the naked bulb that dangled from the ceiling a slender woman with dark hair clouded around her face as if she wanted to hide herself. She was always bending over a piece of work and treading the
sewing machine with her heel. In front of her on the pegboard wall, which was no more than a foot from her nose, hung spools of thread in every size and color, and this was her horizon from eight in the morning till six at night.

  Behind her the table was heaped with dresses to be mended, zippers to be put in, skirts to be hemmed, trousers with ill-fitting cuffs, and suits cut and basted, which had to be finished. The tailor’s wife never looked back for fear she couldn’t go on. She had told this to the priest one Sunday when she went to confession, for she was a devout Catholic, though her husband, raised Lutheran, attended no church now.

  “Sometimes I think I’ll die of despair, Father. I look back and see that the pile never runs out, for just when I think I’m near the end, Morgon heaps on more work. What’s the use, I say to myself, of working my way through a pile that’s got no bottom? And then my fingers just stop, Father, they won’t turn the wheel one more time.”

  “Then you mustn’t look back, my daughter,” whispers the voice behind the grille. “Reach behind you and pick up one piece at a time. One at a time. Then you’ll be able to get through the day. Not to finish the pile; that’s not a thing any of us could do in a lifetime. But to get yourself safely across to the next day. God Himself doesn’t ask more of you.”

  “If only He’d give me a vision to help me through the bad times, Father. Just a small one, so I don’t forget what’s under the pile.” An angel dancing on the point of her needle. A wheel within the wheel of her machine.

  Having no visions, she settled her love on her son. If he was not an angel, he at least came close to flying like one. When she sewed costumes for Amyas and the six boys in his troupe, the needle leaped for joy like a dolphin in the sea of nylon and satin, and the stitches unwound themselves in love. And all the while Morgon Axel walked up and down in the front room and graciously accepted an order for yellow jodhpurs from William Harris, the fiery-haired riding master of High Stepping Stables outside of town.

  “Can I make jodhpurs? My dear Mr. Harris, I can make anything. You should have seen the silver jodhpurs I made for Gene Autrey when I worked in the city. Why, I could make jodhpurs to fit a spider! I remember the first riding outfit I ever made—it was for the Duke of Augsburg who was giving a ball at his castle in Westphalia.” (A self-indulgent laugh.) “All the guests came in hunting costume. Well, I made the Duke a splendid habit in russet velvet, and when it was done, what do you think? I’d cut the trousers with the nap going up one leg and down the other and when the light struck him he seemed to divide himself like a pair of scissors. But he was very kind about it. ‘I’ve invited so many beautiful women,’ he said, ‘that no one will notice.’”

  Mr. Harris pulled off his gloves, a finger at a time, hung his camel’s hair overcoat on the rack, and stood stiffly in the middle of the room while the tailor crawled around him on the floor, puffing a little as he took the measurements of the riding master’s trim figure.

  “Ah, the life I’ve seen,” sighed Morgon Axel, pulling pins out of the cushion that dangled next to his heart. “When I worked in the city, I had my own place right over the Stork Club. Kitchen, bathroom, shower. I had the whole floor to myself, just for work space. Did I ever tell you about the time I had dinner with Jimmy Durante and an English housewife who was flown over because she’d won something in a soap contest? The company gave me a Lincoln—turn, Mr. Harris.”

  Mr. Harris turns and looks straight ahead at the curtain. Behind the tailor’s story, he hears the chugging accompaniment of a sewing machine.

  “You ought to give your wife a vacation,” he says suddenly. “Every time I come in here——”

  The tailor hears and does not hear.

  “A Lincoln, Mr. Harris. It had a built-in bar where most cars have the back seat. But I’m glad to leave it all behind. Here in the country, I’m happy. I go hunting when I want to, I take off a week here and there when the weather’s nice. I’m nobody’s slave.”

  A sigh floats out from behind the curtain, as from a dark well. The tailor has unwittingly spoken the truth.

  What did Mrs. Shore, the banker’s wife, size eighteen, coming to have her new coat lengthened, tell the tailor?

  “I’ve been hearing so much about that boy of yours! My husband saw him and his group at the county fair.”

  “Oh, you’ll be hearing from him one of these days, Mrs. Shore. Any day now, you’ll be seeing him on television.”

  One day the letter from Albany arrives. Now the boast has come true, Morgon is as nervous as a flea, and he appraises the most casual movements of his son.

  What does the tailor see when he looks at his son?

  Himself. Younger. Morgon, yes, but he has lost all the heaviness of a Prussian upbringing. Amyas ambles into the shop after school and throws his books on the chair. He is fourteen.

  “Did you practice today?” asks the tailor.

  “Yes,” says Amyas, pulling a candy bar out of his pocket. He is tall, nearly six feet already, and has an enormous appetite which worries his father.

  “Don’t eat that,” says the tailor, slapping it out of his son’s hand. “You don’t want to get fat.”

  “I burn it up fast enough, don’t I?”

  On the television screen, he moves like a flame. Morgon Axel has called all his friends. He brings the portable TV down to the shop, and Tuesday morning they come by to watch. His wife wanted to go to the studio and watch it live but then they would never know how it looked to everyone else. Here they are, the butcher who works in the grocery shop next door, the fellow from the gas station across the street, Amyas’s classmates and teachers, and Knute Kristofferson, the old violinist who lives upstairs and doesn’t have a color TV. They stand around the set, which Morgon has perched on one of the shelves, having removed the heavy bolts of cloth in honor of the occasion. After a tap-dancing girl and two young boys who play an accordion duet, the master of ceremonies appears on a corrugated pedestal studded with stars. He says something which the tailor barely hears, about the seven members of an acrobatic troupe, led by Amyas Axel. And then suddenly it is he, the fulfillment of all Morgon’s dreams, flying like an angel, like an eagle, from intricate trapezes, hanging from the ankles of one boy, jackknifing to another, like a squirrel jumping from tree to tree.

  Without fear.

  Then all at once the screen goes black.

  “Oh!” cries the tailor’s wife.

  Across the darkened screen appears the words:

  Power failure. Please stay tuned.

  But though they hover around the set for a quarter of an hour, Amyas does not return, and when the image flashes on, a young girl in a tutu is spinning around on her toes.

  In the evening when he’s watching television, the tailor sees out of the corner of his eye another performance going on, less important than the one he’s watching only because he’s not a part of it and it goes on all the time. Amyas on a stool, his legs crooked around the rungs; his mother shelling peas, nodding, listening; the window open, the warm spring air coming through—

  You have told us about the tailor and the tailor’s wife but very little about Amyas. Who is he?

  It is impossible to say for certain, because he’s always moving, and his mother’s testimony is so different from his father’s memories that they might well be describing two different people. Parents seize an image of what they want their children to be, behind which the child moves, trying to fit his body to the shadow-child or hold it up as a shield which lets him grow in secret.

  But when Amyas was sixteen, he had nothing in common with this shadow-child. He became a new person. And that is always terrible for the parents, who have chosen someone else.

  That is to say, having grown tall he began to grow wide. Enormous. From slim acrobat to a man pregnant with the acrobat that had been himself, for you could see the old Amyas still, in his eyes, in his gestures, and you could hear it in his speech. At the age of sixteen he weighed four hundred pounds, through some imbalance of his body which h
ad been waiting all those years to take away his grace.

  The tailor knew nothing of glands and imbalances. He began to loathe the very sight of his son, who seemed to give himself up to the slovenly spirit that had gotten hold of him. Amyas grew a scraggy beard and let his mother trim his hair only around his ears.

  It was his mother who made his clothes now—acres of tweed, of gabardine, which heaped the pile behind her like a mountain. The sick child cries out for love. At dinner she saved the best pieces of meat for Amyas, the extra piece of pie. These acts of favoritism enraged the tailor.

  “Amyas, you look like a pig. Don’t eat like one.”

  (Amyas has just dragged his sleeves into his soup. He is not used to his new body.)

  “You just want the rest of the blueberry pie for yourself. Be glad you don’t have a big belly to fill,” snapped his mother.

  She set the piece of pie in front of Amyas. But shame overcame him. He pushed it toward his father. The tailor found that he did not want it either, yet having asked for it, he pretended to eat it with relish.

  He knows Amyas is always hungry, and he takes great delight in keeping him that way. Didn’t he bring Amyas up in the paths of righteousness and didn’t Amyas fail to bloom? In the back of the tailor’s mind is a lurking suspicion that his son could turn into the old Amyas if he really wanted to, that he’s done this to humiliate his father in front of his friends and customers, to whom he has boasted over and over, “One day you’ll be seeing him on Broadway.”

  You can’t spank a child for taking this way to get back at you but you can humiliate him back to his senses. Amyas sits in back of the shop with his mother, helping her ease the weight of that unfinished pile on her soul. The tailor struts around in the front room—yes, he is prouder than ever now—joking with his customers.

  “Well, if I can’t have an acrobat for a son, I’ll have the male Mae West. Sometimes I feel like I’m running a sideshow in here!”