by David Miller
Somewhere, outside this room that was an end, he knew that a young man, not unlike he had once been, stood on a granite step and listened to the doorbell ring, smiled as he heard a woman’s footsteps come down the hallway, ran his fingers through his hair, and turned the bottle of white wine he held in his hands completely around as he prepared to enter a pleasant and uncomplicated evening, feeling himself immersed in time without end.
TOYFOLK
Edith Pearlman
Only recently discovered by readers outside America, Edith Pearlman (b.1936) won the 2011 PEN/Malamud Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for the stories collected in Binocular Vision. Ann Patchett wrote of them being “an exercise in imagination and compassion, a trip around the world, an example of what happens when talent meets discipline and a stunning intelligence.”
In the town square Fergus was trying out his rudimentary Czech. “Stores are on the ground floors,” he remarked. “People above.”
“I speak only English,” snapped the news vendor, in German. His left hand rested on the awning of his wheelbarrow. Index and middle fingers were missing – their ghosts pointed at Fergus’s throat.
“The cobblestones were light gray once. Dark gray now,” Fergus persisted.
“I have other magazines in the bottom of the barrow,” the news vendor said, in French.
Fergus shook his head, though without censure. An old church stood aslant in the middle of the square. The minute hand of its clock twitched every sixty seconds. Would you go mad, hearing that forever? Would you come to need it, like kisses? A line of customers stuttered into the bakery, and the greengrocer moved sideways and sideways, sprinkling water on his cabbages. Under the October sun the whole little enterprise – church, stores, peaked facades – glistened as if shellacked.
“Good-bye,” Fergus said to the news vendor.
“Au revoir, Toyman.”
Fergus walked away, smiling.
He was a division head of ToyFolk. He came to a new place after a site had been selected, and he supervised the building of the factory and the hiring of the workers, and managed the facility for a while – ten years, usually; well, it never seemed that long.
The knitting shop – what a careful pyramid of yarns. A cat with a passion for some middle ball could set the whole thing tumbling. The druggist’s window displayed old-fashioned brass scales. Then came the premises of an estate agent. A middle-aged woman sat composedly at a typewriter; a young woman peered into a computer screen with an expression of dismay.
And this next place? Perhaps the window meant to be revealing, but it had too many small panes. There was merchandise inside – women’s accessories? He thought of Barbara, and of his daughters and daughter-in-law; and he went in.
Bells fixed to the door announced his presence. Something flipped onto his head and then bounced onto his shoes. A knitted clown.
“Oh!” said a woman’s voice.
“Ah,” said a man’s.
Fergus picked up the clown and remained squatting, examining the miniature buttons of wood that ran down the torso. Each button had been carved by hand. He cradled the toy in his own hand, two fingers supporting the head. Finally he stood up, creaking just a little, and looked around.
Dolls. Dolls crowding each other on shelves like slaves on shipboard. Dolls democratically sharing a pram. Dolls of all sizes sitting one atop the other, the largest on a rocker, exhaustedly supporting the rest.
Noah’s ark, the animals assembled on deck to wait for the dove.
Jack-in-the-boxes. Punch and Judy, on their sides, locked in each other’s arms. A pint-size printing press.
Teddies … His eyes didn’t sting, really; they remembered stinging. They remembered his children asleep, favorites crooked in their elbows. They remembered the plush of his own bear.
The man who had said “Ah” and the woman who had said “Oh” stood in front of a case of toys. They were in their middle forties. Barbara had been at her lanky best then – the rigors of child rearing past, the predations of age still ahead. For this woman, now staring at him with such assurance, beauty must be an old habit. Her pale face was surrounded by hair once blond and now transparent. Her chin was delicately cleft as if by a master chiseler. The irises of her gunmetal eyes were rimmed with a darker shade. She wore a flowered skirt, a blouse of a different flowered pattern, a shawl embroidered with yet another species.
The man’s eyes were a gentle blue. He had a courtier’s small beard, but he was dressed in black garments that suggested the peasant – baggy trousers, a loose vest over a T-shirt.
Fergus walked toward a shelf of windup toys. He stepped side-ways. In a case, tiny ballerinas posed before a mirror, and through the mirror he saw that a curtained archway led to a stockroom.
He glided again, and now the mirror gave him the handsome man and woman in their awful clothes.
“Is this a store?” he asked, turning toward them. “A museum?”
“We are a secondhand toy shop,” the man answered. His accent was French. “That makes us a kind of museum. Most travelers come in only to look. But we get the occasional collector.”
“We started out as a collection ourselves,” the woman said. Her accent was Gallic, too. “We are also a workshop.”
The man shrugged. “I turn out some wooden things.”
“Bernard repairs appliances for the entire population.”
“Anna exaggerates.”
“My name is Fergus.”
Bernard nodded. “The American. The president of ToyFolk.”
“This town has no secrets,” Anna explained.
Fergus laughed. “Not president. A division head.”
“ToyFolk will bring prosperity,” Anna said. “Everybody says so. Will you have some tea?”
Each new posting had brought its special friends. In Burgundy he and Barbara had hit it off with a cartoonist who raised sheep. In Lancashire they spent every Sunday with the dentist and his wife, disorganized, comical, their three children just the ages of Fergus and Barbara’s own. In the Canaries the mayor, a bachelor, cleaved to them with nervous ardor. And now came this pair, served up like a final course. Toy people. What a blast.
“We always have brought prosperity,” Fergus said, smiling at his hosts from the chair they had unfolded. Anna sat on a footstool; Bernard said he preferred to stand. “When we move on things are better than they were – they seem so, anyway. Delicious tea – blackberry?”
“Yes. And your family?” Anna asked.
“Kids all married, living in different states. Barbara joins me next week; she’s in Minneapolis visiting our grandchild.”
“I like your action figures,” Bernard said abruptly. “They remind me of my lead soldiers. Only instead of pouring lead your factory molds plastic – yes?”
“Yes. Limbs and torsos and heads.” Fergus cleared his throat. “Research indicates that as the market for action figures grows, the market for old-fashioned playthings grows also. So you and I are … collaborators.”
“To be sure! But toys are not our living. We support ourselves with repairs.”
“You support me,” Anna murmured. Then she raised her chin as if staring down an enemy. She picked up a music box and put it on her knees and wound it up. Two figures in formal clothing twirled to “Cheek to Cheek,” off tune here and there.
“I’ve tried to fix that cylinder,” Bernard said, shrugging again. “It resists me. Will you come back for dinner?”
“I have appointments this evening,” Fergus said. “And the innkeeper has invited me for a schnapps.”
“Tomorrow, then,” Anna said, as the song wound sourly down.
He came, flowers in one hand, wine in the other. In the rooms above the shop the couple lived snugly, kept company by overflow toys. Dolls fitted their rumps into the corners of chairs, peered over the top of a highboy. Cherry-colored rattles flourished in a pewter mug.
“They were dangerous, those rattles,” Bernard said gravely
. “Imagine putting paint on a plaything for a mouthing child. Some toys were foolish then.”
“Some are foolish now,” Fergus said. “There’s a list, every Christmas, you hear it on the radio in France, in England …”
“Here, too,” Bernard said. “And was anything ever deadlier than a slingshot?”
“Sanctioned by the Bible,” Anna said. “Marbles, though … down the throat …” She shuddered, then produced that soldierly smile, and busied herself ladling the stew.
Photographs lined the passageway from kitchen to bathroom. Snapshots, really, but blown up and matted in ivory and framed in silver as if they were meant to hang in a gallery. All were of the same child – blond, light-eyed. At two she was solemn, in a draperied room, sharing a chair with a rag doll. At four she was solemn against the sea; this time the doll was a naked rubber baby. At six she smiled, clutching Raggedy Ann. At eight the girl with her Barbie stood straight as a stick in front of a constructed pond – could it have been the one at the Luxembourg Garden? Slatted chairs, smoking pensioners, and a toy boat sailing off to the right.
No further pictures.
He found himself unable to swallow.
After coffee he walked back to the inn across the floodlit square – the mayor had recently planted a light next to the church. At tables outside the café a few tourists bent toward each other in puppet conversations. In doorways pairs of men stood motionless. Smoke floated from their pipes. The news vendor stood beside his barrow. The church clock ticked.
Fergus looked up at tiled roofs, then at the mountains beyond. Visiting grandchildren would recognize this scene as the source of tales, he thought with a brief joy. The clock ticked. That girl.
It was still afternoon for Barbara. She was babysitting while their daughter did errands. “Hello!” she heard Fergus say, fizzing with anxious love. “How are you?”
She was fine, and the kids were, too. She had made telephone rounds yesterday. As usual he refused to take the whole for the parts, and asked after each in turn, and the spouses, too. “And the little fellow?”
“A genius, I do believe,” she said. Their grandchild was six months old.
“Of course. And the rash?”
“Prickly heat, entirely gone.” She would not fret him about the little patch of eczema. Then they talked about friends in France and England and the Canaries – Barbara kept up with everyone – and then Fergus asked whether she thought their son was really enjoying law school, and Barbara, who knew he hated it, said law school wasn’t supposed to be enjoyable, was it? Perhaps he’d like practice. “Not everyone can be as fortunate in work as you’ve been.” Immediately she regretted the remark; he did not want to be luckier than his children.
“The kids were my work,” he said.
“Well, don’t tell that to ToyFolk; they might renege on that nice retirement package.” She thought of all those years on all those living room floors, the five of them, and wooden blocks and doll houses and action toys. The school conferences. The older daughter’s flirtation with anorexia and the younger’s brief attachment to a thug on a motorcycle. The army-brat hardness of all three of them … “Darling. They’re on their own at last.”
She heard two sounds, the first a resigned sigh, the second a catch of breath, as if he were constructing one of his catastrophes.
“I can’t wait to see you,” she said.
“Oh, and there’s this couple …”
A cry upstairs. “The baby’s awake.”
“Till soon,” said his soft voice.
Two nights later Fergus visited Anna and Bernard after dinner. In the living room Anna was repairing the headdress of a Japanese doll in a kimono. The kimono had an elaborate design of reeds and a river. The doll’s face was dead white: faithful to life, the color of a powdered geisha. “Is that hair real?” Fergus asked.
“Some of it,” Anna said.
“A museum would give – ”
“She is not for sale.”
At the dining table Bernard was playing chess with one of the druggist’s sons. Bernard introduced Fergus to the boy, and motioned him to a chair; but he did not interrupt the play or his affectionate commentary. He revealed his plans to the child, offered suggestions for an opposing strategy, tolerated the distortion of his advice, allowed young Mirik to progress toward gentle defeat. The boy, cheeks aflame, said: “Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.” Bernard’s hand rested briefly on the plaid shoulder. Then Mirik ran through the living room, pausing to bow toward Anna.
“No knack for the game,” Bernard summed up. “Such a sweet youngster.”
On the night before Barbara’s arrival Fergus came for another of Anna’s stews. He brought brandy along with flowers and wine. After the meal Anna said her palate was as discriminating as flannel and she would excuse herself from wasting fine cognac.
Fergus said to Bernard, “I’d like to see your workshop.”
“Let’s take the bottle there.”
From the stockroom downstairs they descended farther, spinning around a staircase to a stone basement. “This was once the wine cellar,” Bernard said. An overbright fluorescent bar in the ceiling made Fergus’s eyes water. Bernard pulled a string, and now the only light came from the church’s flood lamp spilling weakly through a small high window. The two men sat at the worktable, surrounded by shelves of toasters and vacuum cleaners and radios, or their shadowy ghosts; by dolls without heads and marionettes without strings.
“Where did you learn toy making?” Fergus asked.
“Ah, I taught myself. I like to carve, and I am mechanical by nature, and I trained as an engineer. I was employed by a company in Paris.”
“I studied engineering, too, at Georgia Tech. But it wasn’t my bent. Management was more to my liking.”
“A talent for organization, affability, languages. You could have been a diplomat …”
“I’m not canny. And I worry too much.”
Bernard lit a pipe. “That must make you valuable to ToyFolk.”
“Well, it does. I’ve never seen you smoke,” Fergus said.
“Anna coughs.”
What had felled the child in the photographs? A missile to the eye, a marble in the esophagus? A train wreck, the middle cars humping upward, the engine falling onto its side? Drowning? There were microorganisms resistant to medicine that could lodge in the chest and emit poisons; sooner or later the patient lay dead. He had spent his children’s childhoods making mental lists of dire events, to forestall them.
He looked across the worktable at the smoking man, then looked away. His eye fell on a rectangular wooden box at the end of the table. One of its faces was glass. He reached for the thing. A crank protruded from the side. “Is this an old automaton?”
“A new one.”
Fergus turned the crank. A bulb went on inside the box. A castle had been painted on the back wall. Three carved soldiers in breeches and jackets with epaulets pointed their rifles at a blind-folded figure in a peasant’s smock. One soldier had a blond beard, another a jutting brow, the third a frivolous nose. Fergus continued to turn the crank. The soldiers lurched in unison. There was a tiny blasting sound. The blindfolded figure fell forward. The light went out. Fergus kept at the crank. The light went on: the scene as before – executioners poised, villain erect and waiting.
Fergus worked the toy for a while. Then he said: “What will you do with this?”
“Oh … we’re fond of the estate agent’s children, and at Christmas …”
“You have a rare talent.”
“Oh, rare, no … It passes the time.”
Fergus turned the crank again. “Yes,” he said. “What doesn’t pass the time? Managing factories, mastering languages, raising families …” He had said too much. “More brandy?” he asked, and poured without waiting for an answer, as if the bottle were still his.
Bernard drank. “Your action figures … they all have the same face, yes?”
“The same face,” Fergus admitted.
“Headgear distinguishes them, and costume … Children, young children, identify clothes, equipment, color.”
“Features are too … subtle?”
“Well, research indicates …”
Bernard said: “After all, this is not for the estate agent’s children.” He paused. “I would like to give it to you.”
“Oh, I – ”
“Because you value it.”
“– couldn’t take such a gift.” But he took it.
Barbara rode on a little train that chugged through the mountains. From her window she looked up at pines, down at a miniature town. She recognized it as charming: the ideal final posting for her sentimental man.
When the train halted she stepped briskly off, carrying one small suitcase and a sack of paperback novels. She wore new harlequin glasses bought in the hope that they would soften her bony face.
She leaped toward Fergus and he leaped toward her.
Then Fergus shouldered Barbara’s books and picked up her suitcase. “Only a few blocks to the inn,” he said. “Wherever we live we’ll be able to walk everywhere. In two months we’ll know everybody here. Have you eaten?”
“There was a nice little buffet car. I’ll bet you know half of the citizens already. Let me take the books.”
“I’ve met the officials,” he said, not relinquishing the sack. “The lawyer, the estate agent,” he enumerated as they walked downhill past soft old buildings. “A doctor, too; I met him at a party the contractor gave. All rather wooden, except for a crazy news vendor who speaks in tongues, sort of.”
At the inn she met the innkeeper. Then: “What a model room!” she said when Fergus brought her upstairs. “That fat quilt. Stencils on the highboy. And what’s this?” she said, spotting the automaton.
She listened to a description of a husband and wife who were devoted to toys. Then she picked up the box and turned the crank and watched an execution several times. “The chin below the blindfold,” she said at last. “Such defiance. I’d like to meet the man who made this.”