The Motion of Puppets(39)

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.

Night fell earlier than usual. Perhaps the rain hastened the darkness. Framed in the window directly across the street from his apartment, a couple sat down to dinner, an ordinary evening. Theo watched them eat, chatting over the salads, losing steam when it was time for ice cream. She took away the dishes, and he sat at the table slumped forward, holding his head in his hands, thinking deeply about a serious matter. He did not move until she returned and laid her palm on the back of his neck, and he threw an arm around her hips, pulling her close, and rested his head against the softness of her belly. They remained in this silent embrace for a long time. When they left the dining room together, shutting off the lights, Theo rose wearily and lay on the couch in front of the television.

At two in the morning, he awoke suddenly, mildly surprised to find that he had fallen asleep during the movie. A light glowed from his desk, and seated in his chair Muybridge leafed through Theo’s translation. He was shabbily dressed, his jacket threadbare at the elbows, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck, the collar frayed. A corona of white hair framed his great head, and he seemed oblivious to everything but the book in hand. Theo rolled off the couch and approached him, but the ghost did not look up. Taking a fountain pen from his breast pocket, Muybridge crossed through an entire page and then recapped the top with a click that echoed in the silence.

“Not at all how it was,” he said to himself. “The bastard Leland Stanford took all the acclaim for the pictures of that horse Sallie Gardner. As if it was his idea in the first place. Treated me like a hired hand. Me. An artist.”

“Treachery,” Theo said.

Muybridge looked at him, an aching sadness in his eyes. “Do you know Stanford published The Horse in Motion under his own auspices? Didn’t give me the slightest credit. I had been to Paris and London and was about to present my own paper to the Royal Society. I called it Attitudes of Animals in Motion, and do you know what they called me? A fraud. All because of Stanford’s claims. They’ll believe a rich man over a poor one every time. One day you are a sensation, the next a failure. It was embarrassing, humiliating. My reputation was ruined. I should have sailed back that day and shot that son of a bitch.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Theo said, and then clamped his fingers over his mouth.

Muybridge scowled. “That’s not a very nice thing to say.”

“My apologies.”

“Harry Larkyns was keeping private with my missus. He had it coming.”

“My remark was uncalled for. I’m sorry.”

Pulling at his prodigious white beard with his dark-stained fingers, Muybridge considered whether to forgive him. “Have you ever been married, se?or? Maybe you would not be so quick to judge.”

Theo rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “I was married. Am married. But my wife is missing. One day she was here, and the next she was gone. Some people think she might be dead. Maybe you have seen her on the other side.”

“The other side?”

“Heaven … or wherever people go after they die.” He tried not to sound too optimistic. “I thought since you were dead—”

“Dead? Who said? What gave you the idea I was dead?”

“I didn’t mean anything by it, but you died in 1904 while you were creating a scale model of the Great Lakes in your garden on Liverpool Road. You were seventy-four. A nice long life. I wrote the book on you. Translated it, anyhow.”

Muybridge sat back in the chair and folded his hands across his belly. “Of all the eccentric theories. You think I’m some sort of spirit, a ghost? My good man, have you considered that I might be a figment of your overwrought imagination? A hallucination brought about by a spot of indigestion. You haven’t exactly been eating well since Kay disappeared, and that ham sandwich you had for your dinner—really, sir, you should always check the expiration dates.”

Theo was deeply distressed by Muybridge’s reasoning. He sat back on the couch and stared at his own feet, ghostly white in the darkness, but every time he looked up, the apparition was still there.

“You need to find someone to talk to,” he said at last. “Do you have anyone with whom you are especially close?”

The question drilled into him and punched a hole in his stomach. “Just Kay.”