The Motion of Puppets

by Keith Donohue

  “This one is the narrator for the whole show,” said the Quatre Mains. “She’ll do the entr’acte’s jokes and stories as well as play the part of Beth.”

  “Seems reasonable,” Delacroix said. “Nothing I haven’t seen or worked with before.”

  “That’s good,” said the Quatre Mains, as he clapped him on the back, raising a cloud of dust and dander. “We have thirteen blackout scenes along with the prologue and epilogue and a few in-between monologues, which needn’t concern you much. And one of the scenes involves only two characters that Finch and Stern have created out of their stormy imaginations. So, an even dozen for you to learn. I propose we take on the six most difficult before our supper, and when you return, you can pick up the rest, toot sweet as they say. Not too many lines, and you can be on book since nobody in the audience will be able to see you most of the time. As a matter of fact, in one skit, ‘Lassie, Go Home,’ all you need do is bark like a dog. You can bark, can’t you?”

  “Arf, arf,” said Delacroix.

  “Oh no,” said Finch. “Bark like a collie.”

  “Woof, woof.”

  “C’est bon,” the Deux Mains said. “Shall we get to it?”

  The rehearsal lasted well into the night, a swirl of talk and motion that left Kay baffled. The Deux Mains handled her most of the time, carrying her to a small ledge built into an opening of a tall flat where Kay sat, legs dangling over the edge, facing a sea of empty chairs. When the Deux Mains addressed the stage, she moved the lever behind the puppet’s head so that her words, sotto voce, appeared to be coming out of Kay’s mouth. And then Kay would be ducked away and laid to rest on the floor as the other puppets started another sketch. She enjoyed playing both the narrator and Beth in the Little Women skit with the Three Sisters and a matronly figure who was vaguely familiar. It all happened so quickly and furiously that she could not be sure of any part, much less the whole, of the show. The giants moved like dancers, their hands in constant motion, backs bent, heads hidden, slipping on the glove puppets, twisting the sticks and wires to make the marionettes flit across the stage, talking, laughing, swearing when they made a mistake. The Quatre Mains lorded over the chaos, calling out the titles for each new blackout sketch, hollering up to the invisible person manning the lights over a missed cue. In the end, all the puppeteers collapsed to the floor, congratulating one another on their performances, and after putting away all the puppets in the backstage room, they shut off the lights for the night.

  Exhausted, Kay could hear them retreating and was grateful for the peace and quiet. Far from the inner sanctum, a door closed and was locked. She heard a giggle in the darkness. A small lamp burst into brightness. She sat up, surprised that she could move on her own, and saw Mr. Firkin with his fingers on the switch.

  “Mes amis, mesdames et messieurs, welcome!”

  Around her the puppets awakened and rose.

  12

  “I’m dead,” Kay said. “But you already knew that, having read the book.”

  Out in the dark, a single person gasped. The audience was settling into place, waiting, saying entertain us, make us laugh or cry, willing themselves to be carried away in the promised dream. They listened for what she had to say, words conjured by the unseen voice, and watched the puppet manipulated by invisible hands, until at last they believed. The Deux Mains lifted Kay’s hand to her forehead to shield her eyes from the stage lights. In that simple gesture, she became real, and they were hers.

  “I am your host, Beth March,” she said. “And this is ‘A Little Little Women and Other Puppet Tales.’ You know the story of the four March sisters: Meg, Jo, Amy, and me. Well, I’m the sister who bites the dust. No need to feel sorry for me, though. I kind of like it here, up in the wings, watching it all from above. Gives a girl a certain freedom. And, besides, let me tell you a secret: all art needs a little sadness in it, a small tragedy to balance the human comedy.”

  She stood on the ledge like a jumper at the window. The Deux Mains made her totter before settling into a comfortable position. “Don’t worry, dear friends. May I call you friends? Perhaps not right away, but I hope we are friends in the end. We are not here to talk of life’s tragedies but to entertain you with a number of sketches, some happy, some sad, in our little revue. Like life, our show has plenty of laughs along the way. Sit back, relax. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain or the hands that fiddle with our strings. Let us be friends.”

  The spotlight went off and Kay was swept into hiding. The Deux Mains hurried to another opening for the first scene. From her resting place, Kay could hear the crowd roar with laughter during the ribald bits from “The Regina Monologues” and “Adam and Eve and Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice.” Some sniffled during the rocking chair denouement of “The Olden Girls,” and Kay eagerly waited for the key moment in “Lassie, Go Home,” where young Timmy, played by Nix, fell down the well, and Lassie, played by the Dog, barked incessantly instead of rushing off to find help. The first woof, woof from Delacroix brought a few chuckles, the second, a ripple of titters, but by the fifth plea for Lassie to just go home already, the audience was in shock, and when Lassie lifted a leg, they were fully in on the desperate joke.

  The Russian sisters played a series of roles in many of the scenes, but Kay’s favorite was “Cinderella Goes Shoe Shopping,” with Irina in the title role and the other two as the stepsisters complaining about their feet. Mr. Firkin played the hapless clerk trying to serve all three at once. But it was the ending that fascinated and terrified Kay. By some magical trick, the shoes—also wired—began to dance by themselves in a frenzy, clattering on the stage as the puppeteers stomped on the floor behind them. All five puppeteers worked the actors, but the Quatre Mains handled pairs and pairs of shoes, furious with the sticks, so many flying wires that he indeed seemed to have four hands.

  Most of the time, Kay’s role as MC was to fill in the intervals between the skits, but for “Punch and Judy’s Final Grudge Match,” she played the part of the ringside announcer as Stern’s Punch was relieved of his slapstick and pummeled senseless by Finch’s Judy. Unlike most of the puppets in the show, the Punch and Judy were strangers to her. They had not come from the Back Room, and it took her a while to figure out where she had seen them before. They had been in the front display window of the old store in Québec. They were stock characters, mere toys compared to her friends. Kay caught herself longing for someone she used to love. The man in the bell jar.

  Every performance sped by, barely time backstage for the troupe, soaked with sweat, to change the puppets’ costumes, shift props, wheel backdrops into place. The giants possessed a manic energy, their faces lit with joy as they pulled strings, worked the rods and levers, donned the glove puppets. Bending to her, the Deux Mains smoothed the wrinkles from Kay’s dress and checked the straps to ensure the rods would stay in place.

  “The grand finale,” she whispered to Kay. “Keep it real.”

  In the darkness, the giants took their places. Finch, Stern, and Delacroix handled the Three Sisters and the puppet playing Marmee. The Quatre Mains took control of the rods at Kay’s feet, and the Deux Mains operated her hands and mouth. A spotlight shone, and they walked Kay to the edge of the doorway.

  “The death of Beth,” she intoned. “Or, the last of a little woman.”

  With an assist from Finch and Stern, she maneuvered into bed. A pneumatic device arranged under the quilts of the sickbed made it appear that a doll was breathing her final death rattle. The March sisters and Marmee had gathered around her, watching, their simulated breathing in sync with Beth’s. The only motion came from the trembling of the strings. Their stillness added an air of dignity. The expressive limits of their wooden faces matched perfectly the emotions of the moment. They were born to grief and in their grieving expressed most clearly the defining sorrow of their faces.

  A puppet seagull flew by the window. The tape recording of its call sounded like a laughing maniac.

  “She’s much too
young,” Meg cried.

  “How can she do this to us?” Amy asked. “How can she leave us? Oh, Beth.”

  “I cannot bear it,” Marmee said. “My angel.”

  Jo faced the audience. “She was the only decent one among us. Beth, I will write about you. You won’t be forgotten, and your sacrifice will make me a better writer.”

  “She goes,” Marmee said. “She flies from us.”

  By the alchemy of light and a puppet ghost made of the sheerest silk, Beth floated from the bed and disappeared into the rafters. The surviving Marches bent their heads to the empty bed. The lights were lowered on the tableau and lifted to Kay’s spot by the door. The theater was hushed.

  “Of course,” she said, “that’s not how her death plays out in the novel. No deathbed contrition, no gathering of the sisters. Beth slips away quietly one night, just like that.” She snapped her fingers in sync with the puppeteer. “The book goes on, and there are even a few sequels, as if there are sequels. For Beth, the story ended. As it does for us all. There’s only one ending.”

  With the Quatre Mains moving her feet and the Deux Mains her arms, Kay walked to the middle of the stage, the spotlight following her. Dressed in black, the puppeteers revealed themselves, but the audience continued to focus on the doll.

  “A sister, a sister … a sister lives on as long as there are those to remember her. A mother, a child, a brother, a father, and her sisters and friends. You won’t forget your old aunties, will you? We can try to forgive Louisa May Alcott for the bum ride Beth got, for that rude treatment ill deserved just to make a better, more dramatic book. Because, well, in the end the writer pulled it off. Beth is still alive in us all these years later. All the Little Women made eternal through … what? A book? Art? Love? Or is it all the same?”

  The light circled just her face. “No strings attached.” The audience groaned, and laughed at their reaction to the pun. For a brief second she seemed to stand there on her own, without the assistance of the puppeteers. “Are we still friends? Of course we are. Good-bye, my dears, adieu.” And then a quick blackout.

  When the applause began, the lights went full. Deux Mains had Kay take a bow, but then she dropped the puppet, allowing her to hang limp as the other puppeteers emerged from behind the scrim. The reaction of the first night surprised her, and the acclaim continued through the whole week. Only the matinees proved more subdued, perhaps because of all the children brought by parents who thought puppets were for children or who failed altogether to read the warnings. No matter how enthusiastic, the clapping and cheers enthralled her. The puppets made their exit, spent but exhilarated, an atmosphere of fatigue and euphoria in equal measure.

  After Quatre Mains and the others battened down their sets and props, the puppets rested until midnight. Replaying the performance in her mind, Kay was always surprised by the return to autonomous life, which was made even stranger by the presence of the inanimate ones, the lifeless Punch and Judy, the seven glove puppets who played the dwarfs to Noë’s “Snow White and the Codependents,” and the seagull, nothing more than a children’s toy. Scattered among the dead were some of her old cronies from the Back Room. The Sisters whispered together in a corner. Mr. Firkin regaled Nix with a particular moment in the show when he “had them eating out of the palm of my hand.” Kay longed for the others who had been stowed away—the Devil and the Good Fairy, the Queen and even the Worm. And then there was the curious case of Marmee, who was always hounded by the Dog backstage. Usually she kept to herself, knitting one night and unraveling her work the next, like Penelope waiting for Odysseus to return. Nearly the entire week had passed before Kay had the courage to approach her and inquire directly.

  “How is it that you are alive like us?”

  Marmee lifted one eyebrow and leered at her.

  Kay continued, “Do I know you? You look familiar.…”

  “You mean to say you don’t recognize your old friend? Oh, the Quatre Mains would be so happy to know how readily and easily you’ve been fooled.” She laughed and hunched her shoulders and rocked on her heels. “Are you sure you can’t guess?”

  “Something about you reminds me of the one we called the Hag.”

  “That’s it!” Marmee touched the tip of a knitting needle to the side of her wooden nose. “First try, good for you. Isn’t it wonderful? Aren’t I marvelous? They took off my old head and gave me a new one. Freshened up the stuffing and patched me right well. I feel forty years younger.”

  Kay wanted to reach out to touch her, see if she was real, but a tremor ran along her arm from fingers to shoulder. A bubble grew inside where her stomach used to be, and she felt dizzy enough to sit. “How could it be? You are still you? Not someone else, for you sure look different.”

  “Looks aren’t everything, chick. There’s such a thing as essence. What’s inside you. I’ve been all kinds of puppets over the years. Once I played a bawdy in a honky-tonk show, and once I was a rod puppet on a well-known TV show for children. But things change. As long as you hold on to your essence, you have everything.”

  “But you were taken away with the Judges. What about the Judges? What about their essence?”

  Drawn in by their conversation, the other puppets eavesdropped, curious but quiet. Marmee looked about the circle and confronted the question.

  “They were unmade. You’ll find what’s left of them in a box of spare parts. The stuffing back in Québec. Maybe it was the Original’s idea, or maybe it was a whim of the Quatre Mains. He saw no need for them any longer, so…” She clapped the dust from her hands and wiped them clean.

  “You mean they are gone? For good?”

  “For good, for ill, for what you will. But, yes, they are kaput. No more.”

  The others seemed unfazed, accepting the finality of her pronouncement quite readily. Drifting away in twos and threes, they talked quietly among themselves. Nix cracked a joke that made Mr. Firkin laugh and then chide him with a warning of “too soon.” Puppets changing shape, disappearing altogether. Kay’s notions of order were disturbed, so she found a dark corner in which to hide and contemplate and take exception to just who ruled the world.

  * * *

  Theo spent a rainy Saturday archiving all the photographs of Kay he could find. From a fat album, he scanned in their wedding photographs and then dragged a few dozen images from the social media sites she haunted. He reached into the cloud and ran off prints until the color ink faded to sketches. He plucked another hundred off an old digital camera he had forgotten about, and from his phone, he downloaded a batch from Québec, the latest, the last. Some that she had taken he had never seen, and he searched for some clues, but there was nothing. Any image from that night was locked in her phone, wherever that might be, wherever she might be. He saved what could be found to the hard drive and then made two separate backups on his portables to leave nothing to chance.

  A thousand faces. A thousand memories.

  They had met through friends of a mutual friend at a rooftop party in Manhattan. Kay was with a man who worked in marketing. Theo had shown up alone and was having a miserable time until he met Kay on a corner of the roof overlooking the Flatiron Building. The summer humidity dampened everyone, and she had taken off her light jacket and stood in a sleeveless blouse and skirt, her bare legs and arms alluring. With a swizzle stick, she stabbed at the lemon in her melting drink. She smote him with a smile. They were the last to leave the party.

  Reaching for another tissue, he wiped his wet face and blew his nose. He was surprised at how quickly he could be torn apart. The photographs were safely preserved, at least, but they only recorded a part of her story. Kay’s mother had the other pieces to the mosaic. On their trips to Vermont, she had shown him all the scrapbooks—baby’s first steps, school days, the gymnastic meets all duly memorialized by newspaper clippings and faded ribbons pressed between the leaves.

  “I’m sure Theo doesn’t want to look through all that stuff,” Kay had said. “Don’t subject him to tha
t torture, Mother.”

  “But I do, I really do,” he said. “I want to know what you were like before we met.”

  Dolores flashed a triumphant smile. “Now you see, Kay. I know him better than you do. Come sit by me.…”

  How long had it been since he had spoken with his mother-in-law? Two months? Their conversations had been a chore and a heartache, her questions filled with recriminations over Kay’s disappearance. At first, her tone had been accusatory, looking for signs of his culpability, but in time he thought he had convinced her of his baffled grief. When he returned to the city to begin the school year, Theo tried to reassure her, despite the lack of any news. “How could you give up?” she had asked. “Why aren’t you staying in Québec to keep looking for her?” He explained that he could not quit his job. Their savings had been slowly draining away, and while the college might have considered a leave of absence, the truth was he needed the distraction of the classroom. And his translation. Thank God for Muybridge.

  Her latest phone call had been one long wail of grief and frustration. “Why did she ever marry you?” Anger had bubbled between Theo and Dolores from the beginning. She resented how he had taken her daughter away from her in a time of need and had intimated on many occasions that he was too old for Kay. He bristled at her interference and how quickly she could make Kay feel guilty for having, at last, a life of her own. The accident that had put Dolores in a wheelchair had changed her, or so Kay claimed. She used to be such a sweetheart, Kay would say, but Theo was not so sure. Over the months of his courtship and marriage to Kay, he tried his damnedest to be liked by her mother, since love seemed a too-distant horizon. Why did she marry him if her mother trusted him so little?

  He was so lonesome that he nearly picked up the telephone to call Dolores, just to have the chance to talk about Kay with someone who knew and loved her as well, but he could not bring himself to dial her number. And there was no one else. Kay’s few friends in the city had been solicitous at first, but they, too, had gone on with their lives, and there wasn’t a soul in New York to commiserate.