The Motion of Puppets by Keith Donohue
For Bill and Luise Pugh
“Why did you glance back?
Why did you hesitate for that moment?”
—H.D. “EURIDYCE”
Book One
1
She fell in love with a puppet.
Because he was beautiful, because he was rare, because he could not be hers. Every time she passed the dusty display window of the tiny Quatre Mains storefront, she looked for him. Propped by hidden scaffolding, the puppet stood beneath a bell jar. Two black holes drilled for eyes on just the hint of a face. His smooth blank head was attached by a wooden hinge to his body, which had been hewn from a single piece of poplar, darkened by centuries, and his rudimentary joined limbs had been pierced at the hands and feet. A simple loop, worn and cracked, rose from the crown of his skull. No strings had been threaded through those holes in ages, but he was clearly a primitive marionette carved by an aboriginal Inuit craftsman long ago, the wood now riven by cracks that had opened along the grain. A thin scar ringed his chest, as though once long ago someone had been interrupted in cutting him in two. No bigger than one of her childhood dolls, just over a foot tall. The man out of time waited pensively for someone to rescue him from a glass prison. A skin of dust lay on the curve of the bell, and on a foxed paper label affixed to the bottom lip was inscribed in faded calligraphy: poupée ancienne.
He was the lord of all the other toys in the window, all now familiar as old friends to Kay. Six dolls flanked the man in the jar, three on each side. Brightly painted with frozen smiles and rouged cheeks, their bisque faces shone in the sunshine, and they stared straight ahead, focused on the same eternal spot. They had not been played with for nearly a century, artifacts of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, with thick brocaded gowns and traveling suits, fine nests of hair piled upon their heads. Two of them brandished folded parasols, the tips as sharp as spears. A brown bear in a tatted red fez and a vest embroidered in gold filigree balanced on an iron velocipede, the fur at his elbows and knees threadbare. A hand puppet slouched next to the bear, a sad hound she recognized from the early years of children’s television, its extravagantly long ears dangling to the shelf below. A lurid Punch and Judy, their garish faces bleached by the sun, grinned with their hideous mouths. Mr. Punch cocked his slapstick in hand, always ready to strike his wife. At a certain angle, she appeared to be raising her arms in defense. Odds and ends lay scattered in the shadows: a tiny troop of tin soldiers dressed in scarlet coats and bearskin hats, a pair of glass eyes with lapis lazuli irises, a half-size French horn with a lovely green patina winding through the twists and turns in the brass, and an articulated wooden snake poised to strike a heel stumbling through the grass. Behind the hodgepodge of trinkets, four black marionette horses hung from thick cords, disappearing into the rafters. In one corner of the window a cobweb, burdened with dust, stretched from wall to ceiling and below it lay the husks of two honeybees.
By all appearances, the Quatre Mains had been closed and abandoned. The display window never changed, not a thing out of place in the weeks since she and Theo came to Québec City and strolled to her first rehearsal. Stop! Isn’t this adorable, she had said. No one ever entered or left. The door was always locked. No lights shone in the evenings or on those afternoons when thunderclouds rolled in and spat fat drops against the old storefronts lining the street. Giddy with the adventurous spirit of the newly married, Theo had once suggested that they simply break in to explore its hidden recesses. Because he had more time to go wandering away from his solitary work, he discovered that several of the antique and curio boutiques along this edge of the old part of town, the Vieux-Québec, had fallen on hard times and were similarly out of business, but his dire read of the situation did not stop her from dreaming. She wanted to hold the puppet in her hands. She wanted to take it. Not another soul was on the street, so she leaned in to look closer and pressed her hands against the dirty window. Light penetrated so far and no farther. She could only make out shapes and shadows, the promise of more. Her hot breath left a fog upon the glass, and when she saw what she had done, Kay grabbed the hem of her sleeve and wiped the patch of condensation. Ever so slightly, the wooden man in the bell jar turned his head to watch her, but she never saw him move, for she had hurried away, late again.
*
Kay had circled behind his desk and leaned over Theo, draping her slender arms over his shoulders, and clasping her hands against his heart, squeezing firmly until he raised his hands to hers. She kissed him lightly on the cheek, her long hair falling in front of his eyes, so that he felt encased by her until the moment he moved his hand and she unfolded herself and was away, always running late, trailing a string of good-byes as she departed the room, and the next sound was the door closing with a bang.
The silence after Kay left disturbed him more than the noise she made in preparing to go. For an hour, Theo had been trying to work on the translation, turning over in his mind the problems abandoned the night before, anxious to get to the solutions but waiting, waiting to be alone in the apartment so he could concentrate. He never began while she was present, not wanting to miss the opportunity to share a few words with her as she dressed or dallied over the eggs and toast they shared at three in the afternoon. Most days, she seemed barely aware that he hesitated for her, that he devoted his attentions, for she was also thinking ahead to her work, anticipating the moves that would be required of her during the show. She stretched her limbs and bent her body, and he watched from his chair, enthralled by her simple grace, turning over in his mind a particular phrase, the mot juste, the sound and sense of the French he struggled to turn into English. His mind in two places at once, with her and without her.