Angel in the Parlor

by Nancy Willard

He whispers it into Mrs. Shore’s ear, or into Mr. Harris’s ear, or into the ears of the young girls who come to have their skirts shortened, and they giggle, for they don’t know that it has gone into Amyas’s ear also.

  There is another voice that only Amyas hears. It tells him to go away, it marshals his father’s words and looks together. His mother worries about him, of course, but when she sees he is determined to go, she gives him the names of relatives in the city and a few old friends.

  “I’ll write,” promises Amyas.

  But he never does. And when, after two weeks, his mother writes her friends and her relatives, she finds that Amyas has never stopped there at all. And that’s awkward to the tailor, almost as awkward as having his son home, because people are always asking, “How’s Amyas doing in the big city?”

  “Oh, you can’t imagine the tales he writes us. He’s doing impersonations now. He has a huge apartment over the club where he works—the Cobra, I think it’s called. People come up to his place all hours of the day and night. He told us that one night all the Rockettes showed up in his room with a case of champagne.”

  It gave Morgon the fright that comes over a man who discovers he’s a prophet, when nearly a year after Amyas left home, Mr. Harris came in one morning to order a tuxedo and remarked to Morgon, who was fitting a sleeve, “I think I saw your son yesterday.”

  “Amyas?” squeaked the tailor. “Where?”

  The sewing machine in the back room came to a dead halt.

  “In a little restaurant on MacDougal Street. I don’t remember the name of it—I’d gone there with some friends, and we were having dinner, when suddenly a man came out and announced there would be a floor show. And the act he introduced—well, there was this very large man” (he avoided the word fat) “who came out in pink rompers and played a mandolin and sang. I don’t remember what he sang. But he was awfully funny.”

  “Amyas doesn’t play a mandolin,” said the tailor, trying to calm himself.

  “Well, perhaps it wasn’t Amyas. But it looked like him. I asked the waiter to tell me the name of the man we were watching. ‘Pretty Baby,’ said the waiter, ‘he doesn’t call himself anything else. The manager makes his check out to Pretty Baby.’ I asked if he played here often, and the waiter shrugged. ‘He comes and goes like the wind. We have people who drop by every night, hoping he’ll show up. Sometimes he’ll stay away for months.’ They say he’s turned down a couple of movie contracts.”

  When Mr. Harris left, the tailor hurried into the back room. His wife sat at her machine and looked past her husband as if she were trying to focus on a point just short of infinity.

  “You think I don’t feel it, too, Ursula? You think you’re the only one who feels it?”

  But inside he was afraid. How could the news of Amyas so change the shape and color of his wife’s face?

  “Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down? I’ll take care of the shop.”

  She went without a word. By the machine lay the little date book where he noted the work to be done; Morgon picked it up. At ten o’clock the Fitz girls were coming to pick up the skirts they had left to be shortened and that Miss Johnson who handled trouble calls for the telephone company wanted three zippers repaired in the dresses she’d brought in last week.

  At eight o’clock, Morgon stood in the back room and surveyed the pile. Dresses. Trousers. Jackets. Skirts. Seams to be let out, hems to be taken up, buttonholes to be moved over; he had counted on Ursula finishing them today. He sat down and picked up the first skirt, which was already pinned, and started slowly around the hem. Yellow flowered cotton. Like stitching bees into a meadow. When Mrs. Shore came at a quarter of nine to call for her coat, he had hardly fenced in half the pasture.

  “I don’t hear the machine,” said Mrs. Shore as she tried on the coat before the mirror.

  “Ah, my wife’s not well. I think she’s got a little attack of sinus.”

  Saying it almost took away the dull fear in his stomach. Nobody he knew had ever stayed in bed with a sinus infection for more than a few days. After Mrs. Shore left, he hurried back to finish the skirt. But every time he looked at the pile to be done, a panic came over him. He locked the front door, hung out his sign: closed, and worked all morning in silence. At noon his eyes ached and he went upstairs to find his wife.

  He found her in bed. Her face over the top of the bedclothes looked pinched and craven. The old fairy tale: the wolf grinning in grandmother’s nightgown. Morgon stood at the foot of the bed and stared at her helplessly.

  “You should drink something. Shall I make you some tea?”

  Silence.

  “What can I do for you? Does anything hurt?”

  “Here.”

  She pointed to her heart.

  All afternoon they sat in the waiting room of the emergency clinic, among crying children and a few old women bent nearly double with age. When the receptionist finally called Mrs. Axel, she rose from her chair and trudged into the doctor’s office without looking back. It hurt Morgon that she had nothing to say to him.

  Morgon waited. He picked up the Reader’s Digest. The elevator to the right of him opened and closed; flocks of young doctors hurried in and out, white-coated like geese. Presently he heard his name. Everyone in the room watched him go.

  The doctor’s office with its certificates and abstract paintings and cabinets of instruments made Morgon feel shoddy and stupid. The doctor was younger and taller than Morgon. Wearing his white coat and the casual emblems of his profession, the stethoscope and head mirror, he introduced himself and peered over his glasses at the tailor.

  “You’re Mr. Axel? Please sit down.”

  Morgon pulled up a chair and faced the doctor at his desk like a student waiting for a reprimand.

  “I’m sending your wife to St. Joseph’s for a rest. You are familiar with St. Joseph’s, I presume?”

  “I thought,” stammered the tailor, “that St. Joseph’s was for people who—”

  He stopped. Waited. He didn’t want to give the wrong answer.

  “Your wife hasn’t had a heart attack, as you both feared. Rather, it’s a case of severe depression. A mild nervous breakdown, you could call it. I think that with a month of rest she’ll be able to come home.”

  What did the tailor do on his first night alone?

  He rambled aimlessly from one room to the next, feeling as if a burden had been lifted from him: the moment before you savor your freedom. He fed the dog, washed a few dirty dishes, and put them away. He had no desire to cook anything for himself and decided to eat at a Hungarian restaurant on the other side of town which had always intrigued him. Mr. Harris told him that a family ran the restaurant in an old house and he praised it for “local color.”

  When he entered the front hall of Czerny’s and hung his jacket on the rack, he felt as if he were coming to visit an old friend. The first room he saw contained nothing but a pool table where several young men in leather shorts were shooting a game. Morgon passed quickly into the spacious dining room; it was completely deserted though each table was elaborately set, as if for a banquet of ghosts. Fifty napkins, folded like mitres, perched between the knives and forks and water glasses; a nesting ground of strange birds.

  The tailor found a seat in the corner. To his distress he found that he could look right into the kitchen, where three women were eating at a little table. It would be awkward to move now, he decided. After all, they were paying no attention to him. A baby crawled over to the largest woman, dragging a long rope behind it, which seemed to be tied to one of the table legs.

  But an old man in a white apron was standing in front of him, his pencil poised on his pad.

  “Will you have wine?”

  Morgon nodded and looked around for the wine list; there was none.

  “For dinner we’re having skewered meat and noodles stuffed with red cabbage.”

  It was an announcement rather than a menu, for the old man whisked out of sight and reappeared a moment lat
er with a bottle of wine: Schwartze Katz. Morgon felt he ought to say something.

  “Is it good?”

  “Everyone likes it,” said the old man, shrugging as he yanked out the cork and poured the tailor a glass.

  In the tiny kitchen, the youngest of the three women got up and hurried to the stove. His order had set them all in motion. He avoided glancing at them, but he could hear them chattering in their own tongue as they stirred and scraped and shifted the dishes about. They had interrupted their dinner to serve his.

  The tailor ate slowly, aware that at last the women had sat down again and were eating exactly what he was eating, only without the amenities of clean linen and good service. Suddenly he imagined that they saw him as an eccentric, a crank, and he longed to go and sit down with them. The light outside was falling away; the woman with the child rose from the table and stood at the window, and suddenly everything flared up gold under the last look of the sun. Then the darkness dropped; the old man turned on the lights in the dining room, and the oldest woman began scrubbing a large kettle at the sink.

  When did the tailor first miss his wife?

  Not until he saw a strange woman washing dishes in a strange kitchen. So it had always been, so it would always be. The man out in front, the woman in the kitchen with the child—ah, that was where the real life started. Amyas, ten years old, sits on a stool in the kitchen and talks to his mother, who is shelling peas, nodding, and listening; the window open, the warm spring air blowing through.

  Morgon paid his bill and left. He did not want to go home. He walked over to Main Street and peered in the windows of the shops. It was Saturday night, it was summer, and the young people parading up and down the street gave it the air of a carnival. Standing in front of Pearlmutter’s pawnshop, Morgon examined, with great interest, guns, suitcases, rings, boots, electric fans, cameras, and hair dryers. By the time his bus arrived, he felt sated. Pressing his face to the window he tried in vain to separate his own image from the passing world outside. He got off the bus and felt the first drops of a warm rain and hurried toward his building. As he passed the butcher’s door he saw a little boy, barefoot, hugging himself on the stoop, smiling at him. The tailor hardly realized what he had seen until he was inside his own door and it was too late to smile back.

  What were the tailor’s thoughts as he lay in bed?

  The room is still and nothing is lonelier than the dark.

  What did the tailor see when he entered his shop on Monday?

  A pile of unfinished garments in the back room. How was he going to finish everything? No kindly priest had told him the trick of reaching behind and taking one at a time, the trick of not looking back. Furthermore, he couldn’t very well sit and sew while customers were knocking at the door, demanding to be fitted or to pick up their packages, or simply wanting to pass the time of day. The front room faced the world, resounded with courtesy and opinion; light flooded it from the outside and everything appeared to be under control. But now the tailor found that all this depended on the state of things in the back room, where a deep paralysis had set in. Overcome with anxiety, he closed shop on Thursday and Friday to catch up on back work. He sat in his wife’s chair and lost himself in the tedious tasks that banded her life like a ring.

  And what did the tailor say on Sunday when he visited his wife?

  He stood at the foot of her bed, clutching his hat, staring at this woman who was almost a stranger to him. Her hospital gown gave her an antiseptic air. She seemed to have lost so much of her coarse dark hair that Morgon could almost see the outline of her skull. For the first time, he heard himself lie.

  “You look pretty good, Ursula.”

  Silence. She gazed at him curiously, as if she had forgotten his name. To Morgon’s relief, the patients whose medicine bottles cluttered the other three night stands were gone.

  “Are you comfortable here?” he asked.

  “It’s all right.”

  “You got nice neighbors?” He jerked his head toward the next bed.

  “Margery Wilkes and Norma Tiedelbaum are nice. They’re downstairs with their visitors. But Mrs. Shingleton—agh, she’s disgusting. Saves all her toilet paper, keeps it in her pillowcase. She’s supposed to move up to the sixth floor next week.”

  “Terrible,” said Morgon. Then, hesitantly. “Have you seen the doctor? Has he told you when you’ll be ready to come home?”

  “I will come home,” said Ursula slowly and distinctly, “when I can find someone to take my place here.”

  “What!” exclaimed Morgon. “Why, there are plenty of people waiting for hospital beds.”

  “Yes. But nobody willing to take my place.”

  The tailor felt a little frightened, for it dawned on him that his wife was really losing her mind.

  “Do you mean to say that when you’re well, you can’t leave the hospital? Did the doctor tell you that?”

  “No,” said Ursula. She closed her eyes. “Amyas told me.”

  “Amyas!” cried the tailor.

  “Every night he comes and stands at the foot of the bed. ‘Amyas,’ I say, ‘when will you come home?’ I plead with him, Morgon. I plead with him. ‘It would take a thousand years of weeping,’ he says, ‘to pay a fraction of the grief I’ve had to bear since my father turned me out.’”

  “That’s not true!” shouted the tailor. “I never turned him out. He left of his own free will.”

  Ursula opened her eyes, as empty of feeling as those of fish.

  What was the vision of Amyas’s mother?

  Amyas, dressed in a doublet of green taffeta cut like oak leaves, on a cloth of gold. He hangs like a lantern on the trees outside, his white face shining through the window.

  A full moon tonight, says Margery Wilkes in the next bed.

  Amyas, whispers his mother, when are you coming home?

  What was the vision of Amyas’s father?

  Gabardine in a heap; bills to be paid; a dress form with a hole in its belly and no head or arms or legs; the orders streaming in; his wife’s face. Himself dancing on a treadmill, fed by days pointed like spikes. Without undressing he lies down on his bed, closes his eyes, and sees, brilliant and strange, the mask of sickness that has come over his wife’s face.

  “The animal always tries to avoid the hunter. If the hunter shoots you, you lose. If you avoid him, you win.”

  Ursula shakes her head but already Morgon is counting for her to hide.

  “Eight! nine! ten!”

  Shouldering his gun, he sets out. Trim blue jacket buttoned high at the throat, gold epaulettes, gold buttons where eagles sleep, the iron cross nestled in ropes of gold braid. Every bush shelters a victim. Far ahead of him, Amyas is running for his life, and Ursula hobbles through the underbrush after him, dragging a trap on her foot.

  “Ursula, wait! The game is over!”

  But the gun springs back into his hand. He pulls off the epaulettes and the iron cross, he throws his jacket to the ground. His wife does not stop running; she knows he is the hunter who will never take her alive till he runs beside her as a creature of prey.

  Darkness is rolling in; at the end of Market Street you may see Pearlmutter’s pawnshop. Inside, Solomon Pearlmutter in pinstriped pants and a Hawaiian shirt, is standing at the till, counting his coins into a deerskin pouch.

  Suddenly the shop bell tinkles and in limps a stocky man carrying a huge knapsack on his shoulder and a rifle in his hand. Solomon touches the pistol he keeps under the counter.

  “I have here a number of things I’d like to get rid of,” says the man.

  And he begins to empty the bag on the counter with ritual precision. Masks carved like fabulous animals, photographs of acrobats, broken trophies, a box of military decorations. Solomon keeps his left hand on the pistol and shakes his head.

  “If I can’t sell ’em, I don’t want ’em. You see the kind of things I got here. Watches, rings, guns.”

  His right hand waves toward a wall studded with electric guitars.
Everything in Solomon’s shop knows its place; the guitars stay on the wall, the pocket watches and diamond rings lie in a glass case by the cash register, the accordions huddle together in the front row, the guns hang high over the desk at the back of the store where he figures his earnings at night.

  “You won’t take any of them?”

  The wild look that comes over the man’s face makes Solomon uneasy.

  “No. Sorry.”

  “What will you give me for this rifle?”

  “Let’s have a look,” says Solomon and reaches for it.

  Quick as a snake the tailor takes aim, but he does not shoot.

  Long afterward, when the tailor’s body had crumpled across his mind a thousand times, Solomon Pearlmutter wondered why his attacker had not taken the first shot.

  When Morgon Axel awoke, he was lying in a strange bed. He tried to prop himself up on his elbows and felt as if a knife had cut and salted a deep crevice between his shoulders. Letting his head sink back to the pillow, he turned it slowly to the right and the left. An endless row of beds echoed each other in both directions, yes, and across the aisle as well, though someone had dimmed the light in this room and drawn the window shades. The only light that let him see all this came from the hall.

  Those who cannot walk must fly. So Morgon Axel raised himself up until he saw his own body tucked under a blanket on the bed beneath him. But the real Morgon Axel was floating horizontally out of the ward and down the corridor, like a dandelion seed. Past closed doors, Past a green oxygen tank next to one of them. Past the vases of flowers which the nurses set outside the rooms every night.

  Far ahead of him, he heard voices. A buzz, a confusion as of owls’ wings, crickets’ cries, pigs rooting for truffles in the woods, squirrels rolling acorns in attics. A murmur and cry of doves. Hovering six feet above the floor, Morgon grabbed the door—Doctor’s Lounge, said the letters under his hand—and pushed himself through.

  A forest was growing in the doctor’s lounge. Yes, and there was a judge’s bench where an old Jew sat, pounding a gavel and calling the quails to order, and a skeleton stood at one end of the bench and at the other end Amyas Axel, in green doublet and white stockings, was walking on his hands back and forth under the nose of the owlish clerk, who perched on the Jew’s shoulder and saw everything. The woods were packed with spectators, rabbits and bears and deer, who lifted their heads behind the witnesses in the front row, blond Ingeborg the parson’s daughter and Hans who died years ago and Heinrich who died with him; only their spiked helmets survived. And here’s Otto Strauss, and next to him Frau Nolke, peeling a lapful of turnips.