The Troupe

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “Unless he was still angry with us,” said a third voice from the box on the left. This one was Southern and was meant to be a woman’s, though it had a bass resonance that suggested a man behind it. “Do you think he is?”

  “Yes!” said the professor, and slammed down his book. “I am, in fact.”

  There was a gasp from one of the far boxes, and it shook a little as though someone inside had recoiled. The audience laughed again.

  “What are you still mad at us for, Doc?” said the first voice.

  “You know very well what I’m mad about, Denny,” said the professor.

  “Aw,” said the voice. “Is this about the party?” The top of the box on the far right opened, and a wooden face with large, blank eyes, a pug nose, and a moth-eaten old hat rose out and leaned against the top. The audience laughed and clapped at the puppet’s appearance.

  “Yes, Denny, this is about the party,” said the professor. “You embarrassed me greatly. You walked right up to the hostess and said… You said…”

  The box on the far left opened and another puppet emerged, this one with the blond hair, hoop-skirted dress, and sultry blue eyes of a Southern belle. “He asked if she believed in love at first sight,” she said, her wooden mouth matching the words. The audience clapped appreciatively.

  “Yes!” said the professor, flustered.

  The middle box opened, and a third puppet emerged, this one fat, bald, and with one large eyebrow. “I don’t see what’s so bad about that,” he said in a thick Cockney accent.

  “There’s nothing bad about that,” said the professor. “Well, nothing that bad about that. It’s what he said after that gets my goat. She replied no, she didn’t, and then he said —”

  “I said, in that case I’d have to keep coming back here,” said Denny, and though his face was unmistakably wooden George got the impression that it had smirked at them.

  The drummer in the orchestra rattled off a syncopated beat after the punch line, and the audience laughed as the professor sputtered to respond to his puppet. They were all crude-looking things, like they had each been carved out of a single log, but somehow their crudeness lent them a believable air of expression.

  “You all get more and more out of control every day!” said the professor. “Berry, you even insulted my actor friend!” he told the fat puppet.

  “What? I said he was great in his death scene in the play,” said Berry.

  “Yes, but you said it should have come several acts earlier!”

  Another beat from the drummer (this one a little late, George noted), and the audience roared laughter. Berry mugged for the crowd, even though his face did not seem to move.

  “I guess we did sort of ruin things,” said Denny. “They all got a little down when I told them about my friend Frank.”

  “Frank?” said Berry. “Why, what happened to him?”

  “Well, he passed on.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that, Denny!” said the professor.

  “Yeah,” said Denny. “He fell through some scaffolding.”

  “How horrible!” said the Professor. “Was he fixing his roof?”

  “No, he was being hung,” said the puppet, and again there was the snarl of a snare drum.

  “Oh, Denny!” said the professor. The crowd clapped and cawed laughter.

  “He’s rigging them up underneath the table,” whispered a woman in the row before George.

  “Hush,” said her friend, but George had thought the same thing. Yet even so, how was the professor manipulating three puppets at once?

  “I didn’t do anything wrong, did I, Doc?” said the Southern belle puppet.

  “No,” said the professor to her kindly. “No, you didn’t, Mary-Ann.”

  “Good,” she said. “Though I did meet the most delightful man at the party.”

  “Did you?” said the professor.

  “Oh, yes. He’s very well respected, a Southern planter.”

  “Ah, very good.”

  “Yes,” she said, “he’s an undertaker from New Orleans, you see.”

  “Oh!” cried the professor, anguished at having been made a fool of again. The bass drum belched down in the orchestra pit, and the audience hooted and clapped. “What can I do to get you all to behave!”

  “Well, why don’t you let us out, Doc?” said Denny.

  “Let you out?” said the professor.

  “Yes! Let us stretch our legs.” He wiggled in his box as though straining to move his limbs. “Let us out of the boxes, Doc, and set us loose!”

  “Oh, Denny,” said the professor, “I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”

  “Why not?” said Berry. “We could be real people for you!”

  “Real?”

  “Yes!” said Mary-Ann. “Real people, for you, for everyone! For this one last performance here!” She turned to beam out at the audience.

  “We could own houses, ride trains, and even vote!” said Denny. “Several times, if we wanted to!” Again the puppet seemed to smile coyly.

  “But why would you want that?” said the professor.

  “Everyone wants that, Doc,” said Denny.

  “We’d be no longer wooden,” said Mary-Ann. “No longer so stiff, so hard, so cold.”

  “Yes,” said Berry. “Everyone wants to be real. You’re one or the other. You are or you aren’t. And here we are, stuck in between.”

  The audience members laughed a little, but glanced at one another, unsure. Usually every exchange was a joke, but this one didn’t seem to be heading toward a specific punch line. The drummer was searching through his sheet music, confused as to where the next beat fell. Onstage the puppets all gained a hungry look to them, but it could have just been the shifting of the light. And was it George’s imagination, or was the light on the stage now coming through the window on the backdrop, as though projected by the painted moon?

  “But children,” said the professor, “you’re not real. You’re not real people at all. See?” He reached out with one hand and knocked on Berry’s head, producing a comical, hollow sound. The drummer in the pit rattled out a line on the snare drum along with it.

  “That hurts,” said Berry softly.

  “We’re real enough,” said Mary-Ann. “Real as anyone else. Take us and chop us up and grind us to pieces, and you’ll find naught a thing alive.”

  “But do that to any other folk, and you’d find the same,” said Denny slyly.

  “Yes,” Berry said. “We speak and we want. We see and we hear. We’re real enough, Father, just enough.” The puppets turned to the professor eagerly, and George felt unsettled. He was reminded of piglets voraciously suckling at the teats of a hog, squirming to get a better spot. He could tell now that all the puppets were being voiced by one performer, but somehow he did not think it was the professor. And there was something wrong with the stage… The backdrop seemed noticeably less painted on. George could swear the slats in the farmhouse walls were casting shadows.

  “That backdrop is very odd,” whispered the woman in the row before George.

  “I know,” said her friend. “It doesn’t suit the act. Why would he be performing beside a lake?”

  “What?” said the woman. “What lake? There’s only the circus.”

  “A circus? What are you talking about?” asked her friend. “There’s no circus, just the field and the lake. Look at those odd, bendy shrubs, and glowy beetles, and those people playing at the shores of the lake. But the people don’t look right to me. Their arms and legs are too long and bent. Do they look right to you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the woman. “There’s only the circus behind him. But there’s something wrong with the animals… some of them don’t look like any type of animal I’ve ever seen before. And I don’t like the clowns at all. Their eyes do not seem right to me…”

  George was completely perplexed by what the two women were describing, and peered at the backdrop again. But he could only
see the old farmhouse, with its moonlit windows and its crooked trees outside. But how could they be so mistaken?

  “You see and hear and speak,” said the professor to his puppets, “and you do want. But you do not eat or sleep, or live, or dream.”

  “No,” admitted Denny. “No dreams. No dreams for the dark. Just waiting, waiting.”

  “Waiting for the light to crack through again,” said Mary-Ann. “For the top of the world to open up, and to find all these lovely people waiting for us!”

  “Laughing!” said Berry.

  “Clapping!” said Denny.

  “Waiting for us, all of them!” said Mary-Ann.

  “We do the same,” said Denny, “the same as them: waiting, laughing, clapping, but you say we are not real?”

  The professor gathered himself. “I do say you are not real. And not-real things belong in boxes, and the dark. Where you came from, and where you shall return.”

  “But Father!” cried Mary-Ann.

  “Oh, no,” said Berry.

  “You are not getting out of the boxes,” the professor said. “You must stay in the boxes, for me.”

  “For you, Father?” said Denny.

  “Yes. That is final.”

  All three of the puppets seemed to droop slightly, as though depressed by his proclamation.

  “I would not mind it so much,” said Mary-Ann, “if we could sleep. Or dream. But we cannot, and stay awake. We stay awake in the long dark.”

  “I tire of this,” said the professor. “Now, Denny. Why don’t you tell us that delightful joke you told me just the other day?”

  “Which one, Father?” said Denny, but he now sounded morose.

  “The one about the medicine,” said the professor, and he stood up and ripped off the drape around the table. The audience gasped when he did: there was nothing below the table at all: no mechanisms that they could see, and no strings or levers. The boxes sat on what looked like solid wood, unless there were mirrors involved, but there couldn’t have been because when the professor sat back down his legs were clearly visible, hands in his lap.

  “The one about the medicine, Doc?” said Denny.

  The professor’s hands did nothing. They were clearly visible above the table. People along George’s row stared at one another in astonishment.

  “Yes,” said the professor, and he crossed his arms. “The one about the medicine.”

  Denny sighed. “All right, then. There was once a man I knew just down the street from me who was loath to ever take his medicine,” he began. “Yet then one day he went to the doctor, and that very afternoon he was seen sprinting down the street, pouring some potion into a spoon and swallowing it as he ran.”

  “He didn’t!” said Berry.

  “He certainly did. Then the next afternoon the same thing happened: he bolted out of his house and tore down the street, pouring his medicine and gulping it down.”

  “How very strange!” said Mary-Ann.

  “And then the next day, the same thing, and everyone came out to watch him run down the street,” said Denny. “Yet on the fourth day he skipped down the street, just like a little boy, and he took no medicine at all.

  “Finally a policeman stopped him. ‘What’s the big idea?’ said the cop. ‘Why, I’m just following my doctor’s orders!’ said the man. ‘Orders?’ said the cop. ‘What orders?’ ‘He said to take my medicine for three days running, and then to skip a day, which is exactly what I’ve been doing!’”

  The drummer bashed a cymbal and the audience laughed at the joke, but it was more than a little uncertain. The puppets did not sound like they were in a humorous mood at all. And then there was the backdrop again… Were the trees in the window moving, as though brushed by the wind?

  But the professor smiled, stood up, and took a bow. The puppets did likewise, saying, “Good night,” though they sounded terribly sad. Then they sank into their boxes and shut their lids with a sigh. The professor walked to each box and picked it up off the table, taking care to show the audience that there were no holes or false bottoms or any other mechanism. Several people gasped. He stacked the boxes in his arms and said over the top, “And with that, ladies and gentlemen, good night! Why don’t you say goodbye one more time, Denny?”

  Denny’s head poked up from the top box once more. And then, though George swore it couldn’t have, the puppet winked at them, and said, “To sleep, to dream, and awake anew. Good night!” and sank down below again. The professor tipped an imaginary hat and walked toward the side of the stage as people applauded. The curtain dropped before he reached the edge, concealing him from view.

  “That was very weird,” said the woman in front of George.

  George was inclined to agree. The act had been very funny until the light on the stage changed. Then things had gone strange. It had felt like the backdrop was a window into another world, and the professor and his companions had been fabricated versions of people on the other side, staring back at them through the glass. He was about to say something when Silenus mounted the corner of the stage again, hat nestled in the crook of his elbow. George’s heart leaped at the very sight of him, and he suddenly felt torn: he wanted the show to be over so he might have a chance to meet his father, but he also wanted to see the rest of the acts; he’d heard so much about them, and the first one had been so odd, that his curiosity was almost overwhelming.

  “What an odd little family they are!” Silenus said. “But so are all families, are they not? Especially the family of our next performer. Royalty they were once, ages and ages ago, in far away barbaric places of sun and sand and scimitars. Her family had been wronged, dislodged from their rightful throne, and so fell to dissolution. I found her in the deepest parts of Persia, fallen from grace, performing her eloquent arts for mere coppers and coins, and begging for a moment of charity. Yet I rescued her, and taught her to rule her new domain of the stage. And now you, my fine ladies and gentlemen, have one of the rare chances to hear the songs of none other than her majesty, Colette de Verdicere!”

  The curtain stayed lowered so George figured this would be an olio act, performed at the front of the stage before the curtain while they readied for the next full-stage act. He saw someone approaching from backstage, about to enter into the light. George ignored them and squinted into the shadows, trying to see where Silenus had gone.

  Then the performer finally came out on the stage, and the woman in front said, “Oh, my goodness! How pretty!”

  George absently glanced back, but stopped, eyes wide, and gaped at the stage. And for the first time since that morning he forgot entirely about Silenus and his long quest to see his father’s show.

  Because George Carole had seen the girl, and now could see nothing else.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Chorale

  The first two things that struck George were her size and her brownness, both of which were accentuated by the glowing white of her gown and tights. She seemed very tall as she danced across the stage, tall enough to topple over should she misstep, yet she never did. In her hands she carried a small concertina, and though it must have been difficult to play while twirling about she still pumped out a chirpy, happy song and grinned as if all of this were the easiest thing in the world. As he watched the curl of a white-tighted calf as it flashed over the footlights, George began to grin as well.

  But the color of her skin was what his eyes hunted for the most, smooth and creamy like coffee and milk, brown and gleaming where light found the rippled muscles in her back. Sometimes she nearly blended in with the dark red of the curtain, making it difficult to see each twist and curve of her arms, upon which, he noted with interest, was the slight suggestion of amber down. And floating above her white-clad body was a jeweled, feathered mask which hid all but her mouth and chin. George strained to find some hint of wickedly happy eyes within the holes of that mask, and could not; yet each time she did some movement which she found particularly pleasing, her copper lips would part and reveal a set of
perfect white kitten’s teeth, and he knew somewhere behind that mask were two eyes crinkled with delight.

  “Hot damn,” said the man sitting beside him. George felt the fleeting desire to sock him in the jaw.

  He dimly became aware that the girl was singing. He tried to focus on the words, but it seemed to be in another language, perhaps French or something exotic enough to match her strange beauty. Then he realized he was wrong, and it was in English, and he caught a few lines between the hums and toots of her little concertina:

  Mothers, please hold tight to your children

  Maidens, don’t hold back your sweet songs

  For the sun finds its sleep in the far hills

  And the time of this world won’t be long

  Dance in the meadows, wander down roads

  Sing in the forests and glades

  Follow the stars to their far-flung cradles

  Drink your sweet wines in the shade

  Make sure your partings are happy and true

  Await the sun’s sparkling and happy debut

  Drink in the sky and the scent and the view

  For the day of this world shall soon fade

  Then the song would seem to drift back into another language again. It was dreamy and peculiar, describing worlds and lives George didn’t know but wished he could lead. He watched the girl flex and sway as she moved to the bleating of her concertina, and studied the angular swirl of a tricep, or a deltoid, or a trapezius, and thought she surely had to be carven. A creature this beautiful could not be naturally created.

  Then the girl danced to the edge of the stage and began pumping her concertina. With a series of sharp pops, little jets of colored ribbon and glitter shot up from within the instrument to rain upon the audience, who laughed in delight. George remembered he hadn’t thought to breathe in some time, and let out a deep gasp. Then he swallowed and shifted in his seat, surreptitiously trying to maneuver the staggering erection that’d suddenly appeared into a less prominent position, while the girl kept twirling back and forth across the stage, pumping the concertina and sending the colored paper arcing out over the people until he was mesmerized.