Angel in the Parlor

by Nancy Willard

  I heard my cat scratching faintly at the front door.

  I got up and opened it, and somebody pulled me outside. But outside was inside; all around me, torches sputtered and popped, clothes smelt of pitch, and my spotted cat was no cat at all, but a girl in a pied gown who scampered away down the aisle that opened at my feet.

  The church looked fuller than I’d ever seen it. In front of the altar, Reverend Peel, by the light of the acolyte’s torch, was censing the people with a sausage in his left hand and a pot of smoking shoes in his right. He had wreathed his bald head in poppies, turned his vestments wrong side out, and thrown away his glasses.

  Kyrie eleison kyrie eleison

  shouted the choir from the balcony over my head. And the people shouted back,

  Heehaw! Heehaw! Heehaw!

  Helen was walking, with measured tread, down the center aisle, holding the baby wrapped in a rabbit skin. Diamonds blazed on her hair and on her eyelashes and on her white gown.

  The King is coming, whispered Mother into my ear. The King is coming from a far country to bless the baby.

  Everyone turned.

  A donkey was walking down the aisle, its ears crowned with ivy, its legs sleek in black leather stockings, a scepter locked between enormous teeth. The moon sprang out of its left ear, the sun out of its right.

  Riding before it on a black goat, Caleb, splendid in white buckskins, strewed grapes for the donkey’s hooves to crush into wine. And loping along behind came Nuisance, ribboned with penny whistles piping by themselves.

  Now a shout went up from every throat. And in that instant I knew this was no donkey, but a magician disguised as a donkey, and one far more powerful than I. Slowly the beast turned around, showing its handsome black stockings. It stepped up to the altar and laid aside the scepter. Helen held up the baby and it touched the holy water to eyes, lips, and ears.

  When it finally spoke I knew the King had always been speaking, only I had not had the ears to hear. It did not ask Helen to abjure the devil and all his works, yet I knew it was not the devil. It did not promise salvation, yet I was sure it had come to save us.

  “And some there be,” said the donkey, speaking very quietly, “who have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been.”

  Over our heads, the carved rafters remembered their names: oak, ash, maple, and pine. They put out bark and leaves, and the angels carved there were no more. The scepter shrank to a hazel wand, but the beast did not notice.

  “But these were merciful men,” it continued, “whose righteousness has not been forgotten.”

  The glass in the windows blew away, sparkling like a million grains of sand. The pews rolled up into logs, grass grew between my toes, I could not see who stood beside me and I could no longer remember my own name.

  But the donkey’s voice breathed over me like wind across a field: “Their seed shall remain forever. Their bodies are buried in peace, but their names live forevermore.”

  Then, not three feet away from me, Etta turned over on the sofa bed and sighed deeply.

  The morning air raised gooseflesh all over me as I awakened, and I knew it would be cold on Steeple Hill when we gathered at the cemetery for the sunrise service.

  Up on Steeple Hill, where all our people lay buried, a wind bowed the bare trees and sent the clouds scudding like foam as we waited for Reverend Peel to open the gates to the cemetery.

  Most of the fathers, including mine, were home in bed.

  Over the heads of the women and children, the gold cross swayed in the pastor’s hands. The acolyte lifted the Easter banner high as a sail; its embroidered lamb sank and swelled, all heartbeat and pulse in the wind.

  “Where is the sun?” I asked my mother.

  “Behind the clouds.”

  “But how do you know, if you can’t see it?”

  “Because it’s light outside.”

  Kirsten fiddled with the little silver cross she wore only on Sundays. She had a new pink coat, and I caught myself wondering how long before she’d outgrow it and I could have it.

  His vestments blowing like laundry, Reverend Peel threw open the gates at last, and we marched in singing:

  Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!

  Early in the morning our song shall rise to Thee!

  Are the dead surprised? Do they look at us, do they look at me? Does an old woman see her features in mine, does an old man see in Kirsten his young wife who died so long before he did? Do they sit in their graves as we sit in our pews, are we the service they wait for?

  We walked two by two, singing bravely against the wind:

  Though the darkness hide Thee

  How lovely it was there in the morning! Patches of snow gleamed in the shade of the headstones, but everywhere else the grass showed damp and green, though it had lain there the whole winter.

  4

  The Tailor Who Told the Truth

  In Germantown, New York, on Cherry Street, there lived a tailor named Morgon Axel who, out of long habit, could not tell the truth. As a child he told small lies to put a bright surface on a drab life; as a young man he told bigger lies to get what he wanted. He got what he wanted and went on lying until now when he talked about himself, he did not know the truth from what he wanted the truth to be. The stories he told were often more plausible to him than his own life.

  What was the first lie?

  That his father was rich. The richest man in Germany.

  Told to whom?

  Ingeborg Schonberg, the parson’s daughter he loved in Potsdam, where he grew up. Yes, a lie, because his father was not rich. Karl Axel owned a secondhand shop in one of the shabbier quarters of the city. The family lived behind the shop: Hans the oldest brother and after him Heinrich, who were tall and blond and loved practical jokes and wanted to go to sea. Johanna Axel, née Schweber, daughter of the widow Schweber, who cooked for a doctor and his family in Potsdam. Johanna Schweber made good money till she married Karl. Morgon Axel, born in 1896, when Hans was seven and Heinrich was six. Yes, that’s the one: Morgon, who from the beginning was dark-haired and short like his father. He was five years old when he told his first lie. No, not his first lie. Let us call five the age of discretion here: therefore, the first lie on record. Told to the parson’s daughter, age five and a half. The second lie does not concern us. Because then we would have to deal with the third and fourth also.

  Look at him now, seven going on eight, a pack of lies behind him, reading at a cherrywood table in his father’s shop, among busts of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Frederick the Great, who lour at him like schoolmasters. Morgon has made himself a little place for his books behind a barrier of cut-glass bowls, stags’ heads, stuffed owls, and nutcrackers carved like the heads of dogs. And don’t forget the cuckoo clocks and the shields and visors and guns of the hunters who have gone down at last with the stags and the owls they killed. Morgon has befriended the guns and named them: Ernst, Dieter, Barbarossa.

  Sometimes Saturday and always Sunday (on Sunday Johanna Axel is singing in church), Karl takes his three sons hunting in the forest beyond the city. In the forest live woodcocks, partridges, wild boars, and deer with antlers that branch out like coral. Morgon’s brothers knock partridges out of the air as easily as winking. His father shoots hares and saves the paws for luck. He has hundreds of paws stacked away in a cupboard. Morgon hits nothing, but that’s because he’s so new at it. In his sleep he dreams of shooting so straight and so far that he knocks the sun out of the sky.

  Is there anything more monotonous than shooting partridges and hares every Sunday of your life? It is the fourth Sunday of his tenth year, and he’s been hunting with his father ever since he told his first lie at the age of five. The creatures they’ve shot, he says to himself, would fill the Nymphenburg Palace. Has Morgon seen the Nymphenburg Palace? Never in his life. But he has read about it. He has tried to read every book in his father’s shop and all the books in his father’s house, though he understands very little of them: The
Memoirs of the Margrave of Augsburg, History of the Imperial Army, The Court of Karl-Eugen, Prince of Württemburg. Morgon has told himself that if he can read them all, his brothers will come back.

  They come back before he has accomplished this. One clear July afternoon there they are, standing in the middle of Johanna Axel’s kitchen, both of them shining like the family silver. Trim blue jackets buttoned high at the throat, gold epaulettes, gold buttons where eagles sleep, a spiked helmet where an eagle is spreading its wings. The iron cross nestled in ropes of gold braid that glitter like icicles across their chests. Boots so tall their legs look slim and graceful as a girl’s. Johanna Axel nearly goes out of her mind with joy.

  “I have a son in the academy at Kiel and another doing us proud in Berlin: I couldn’t possibly ask for more.”

  It is Saturday. Have they forgotten?

  “Tomorrow we’ll go hunting,” says Hans, slapping Morgon on the back. “It’ll be like old times.”

  That afternoon they all go visiting, all except Morgon who stays home to mind the shop. That’s how he happened to be there when the bell tinkled and in hobbled a wild boar which lifted its head over the counter.

  Morgon jumped: the cut-glass bowls and nutcrackers jumped with him. The boar’s face slipped away and he saw an old white-bearded Jew in a skullcap and black coat.

  “I wonder,” said the Jew, “if you’d be interested in buying a few items I have here.”

  Morgon eyed him suspiciously, for hairs stuck out of his nose like tusks. From the box he had set on the floor, the man brought up a clock case, carved to resemble a country church.

  “A few repairs, and you can sell it for a fortune. It belonged to the fourth Duke of Württemburg. When the clock strikes, twelve angels rush out to beat the hours. The Crucifixion takes place in the upper window, and the twelve apostles come out of the lower door two by two, bow to the Savior, and return. All the while it plays Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott.”

  “But it doesn’t keep time,” said Morgon, staring at the motionless hands.

  “No. But if it did, you could sell it for a fortune.”

  “Then my father won’t want to buy it. What else have you got?”

  The Jew sighed.

  “I have here a fine collection of masks, at least two hundred years old. They come from the castle of Grafeneck. The duke’s guests wore them at a masked ball. Here you see the mask that the archbishop was forced to wear in order to have an audience with the duke——”

  He pulled out the face of the boar, carved in wood and painted bright blue. Gold rings hung in its ears. The old man laid it on the counter.

  “And here’s the mask ordered by Baron Wimpffen. A great joker, I’ve heard.”

  A red hyena with pearls in its snout joined the boar.

  “And of course, for the Baroness d’Oberkirch, this lovely brown doe wearing a tiny crucifix in a golden crown. The others, well, I’m not sure who wore them——”

  He laid them out in a row across the counter for Morgon’s approval. An emerald green dog with roses curled on its cheeks. A black bear wearing a mitre, and an animal that looked rather like a goat, though Morgon couldn’t be sure. Under the jeweled eyes of each face were slits for the wearer to see out.

  “Six masks in all, young sir. They’re absolutely priceless.”

  Morgon lifted the bear to his face, the Jew lifted the dog, and they looked at each other, then each set his mask aside.

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Morgon. “Can you come back Monday? My father does all the buying. I only wait on people.”

  The Jew’s expression passed from polite reserve to polite terror.

  “Can’t you give me something toward them now? They’re worth at least four hundred marks.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t. You’ll have to come back.”

  When Karl Axel returned and saw the masks, he was delighted.

  “They’re superb,” he exclaimed. He was in excellent spirits: they had gone to see his brother Ernst who ran a butcher shop and whose wife had given him nothing but daughters. Business would never be better than in the next few days: Rabbi Mendel’s grandmother had gone mad, fled out of her house, and plunged a knife into Ander Krüller’s only son. Yes, that same Krüller who sat on the city council, and all the cousins of Rabbi Mendel and his wife, who numbered in the hundreds, were selling their possessions and fleeing the city.

  “If he comes back, we’ll give him two hundred marks. But it’s likely he’s on his way to Berlin by this time.”

  Is there anything more monotonous than hunting partridges and hares every Sunday? Is there anything more exciting than an animal who might, at the edge of enchantment, turn itself into a human being? The next morning Heinrich and Hans and Morgon packed up the masks, shouldered air guns, and traveled to the forest beyond the city. Morgon carried the masks on his back. The forester let the brothers take the horses they always rode with their father. When they reached a clearing they dismounted. Morgon threw the masks on the ground.

  “The rule is,” said Hans, “that whoever plays an animal will try to avoid the hunter for one hour. If he succeeds, the animal wins. If the hunter shoots him, the animal loses. Who wants to be what?”

  “I’ll be the bear,” said Heinrich. He stopped, picked up the bear’s face, and slipped it over his own. Morgon gasped. Before him stood a bear in Prussian uniform, cruelly raised to the tenth power.

  “Morgon, your turn.”

  “The dog,” said Morgon. He put on the mask. Its features pressed against his face. He felt hot inside and the eye slits did not fit him properly. He could hardly see.

  “Go and hide yourself,” said Hans.

  “But the animals should be allowed to take their guns,” exclaimed Heinrich. “In case we meet the boars and bears who do not turn into humans.”

  Hans played the hunter, and Morgon had never known such excitement. To lie in the bushes and hear his brother stalking him, to hear him cocking his gun, that was much better than watching woodcocks drop out of the sky. Furthermore, in the role of the animal Morgon excelled both his brothers, because he was smaller, and as he was unhampered by a uniform he could move faster.

  “The hunter has the worst of it,” said Hans. “He knows it’s just a game and there’s not a chance of hurting anybody when you’re protected by a mask. We ought to play without masks.”

  “Without masks?” repeated Morgon.

  “Why not? Once you’ve played the animal, you don’t need a mask to turn you into a dog. Then you’re as vulnerable as an animal really is. It makes you play harder.”

  That’s how Morgon Axel, at the age of ten, crawled out of a bush in the forest outside Potsdam and lost his right eye to the gun of his brother. The hunting came to an end, the brothers went back to their regiments, and Morgon Axel got fitted with a blue-glass eyeball.

  “Don’t be bitter,” his mother told him. “It was a game that turned out badly.”

  On his eighteenth birthday, he went to enlist in the Imperial Army, but no lie was big enough to cover the blue-glass eyeball he wore in his head. So he went to Berlin and applied as assistant to Otto Strauss, a tailor who specialized in uniforms, on whose door you could read in bold Gothic script:

  O. Strauss, kgl. preuss. Hoflieferant

  Inside you could find all those decorations which so warm the heart of your Prussian officers. Drawers of epaulettes, gloves, and buttons for every rank. Yes, and the shelves of spiked helmets embossed with shining eagles, like the blessed instruments of a holy sacrifice. Yes, and the bolts of blue wool and spools of gold braid; tasseled swords and riding whips and slim black boots. On the walls, O. Strauss had kept several large photographs of the Kaiser and his family and many smaller ones of high-ranking officers wearing the uniforms he had made for them. And look, over here’s the most recent one: a fine photograph of General von Kluck’s First Army entering Brussels, with horses and caissons. (Did Otto Strauss know General von Kluck? No.) It was August 1914, and uniforms we
re greatly in demand. O. Strauss marched up and down the shop and surveyed his prospective assistant.

  “What I need,” he said, “is somebody who knows as much about the military as he knows about fitting and altering clothes. Tell me: how many centimeters should you leave between the cuff buttons on the uniform of a captain in the reserves?”

  “Herr Strauss, you insult me,” exclaimed Morgon Axel, waving his hand grandly. “I come from a long line of tailors. My ancestors were the royal tailors to Frederick the Great. A dressmaker on my mother’s side designed the wedding gown of Wilhelmina von Grävenitz.”

  O. Strauss leaned against his counter and stared, but Morgon Axel continued unabashed.

  “And as for the military! I have two brothers. The oldest is a lieutenant in the Imperial Navy. The other is the captain of the division of the Prussian Guard recently cited by General Ludendorff. I am related by marriage to Colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck and my oldest brother has the ear of Admiral von Holtzendorf.”

  O. Strauss touched his ear nervously.

  “My father won the Pour le mérite in the last war.” And as he spoke, Morgon saw his father dashing through Ypres on a black horse, shouting to the soldiers lounging in the courtyard: Attack! We are being attacked from the west!

  “Why, may I ask——”

  “I had the misfortune to lose my right eye in a hunting accident. But my left one is as sound as yours.”

  “Well, well,” murmured O. Strauss. “I’ll be glad to try you out. We have all sorts of men coming in here. You’ll find most of them are hard to please.”

  From that lie forward, Morgon Axel acted as O. Strauss’s assistant. By day he helped him lay the patterns for cloaks and jackets on long fields of blue wool, and he pinned sleeves and collars on the stocky bodies of officers who made appointments to be fitted. After work he hurried to his room high up in Frau Nolke’s house at the other end of town, lugging the shop’s manuals on the regulations for military dress which he read far into the night. When he had memorized the fundamentals, he began borrowing uniforms, every night a different rank, so that he could examine how they were made.