Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

by Pearlman, Edith

  “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 blindfolded 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.”

  “You will. Are you tired, darling?” her husband asked.

  “Not too tired. Darling.”

  FIVE DAYS WENT BY before Fergus and Barbara could get together with Bernard and Anna—five days of meetings, of house hunting, of the hiring of a tutor. “Though I’m not sure I have the stomach for another language,” Barbara said. “I’ll mime my way around.”

  At last the four met on a Saturday night in the dining room of the inn. Under his vest Bernard wore a button-down instead of a T-shirt. He looked like a woodman. Anna wore a cocktail dress—Fergus remembered that his mother had once owned one like it: blue taffeta, with a wide skirt.

  The innkeeper sent over a bottle of wine. They bought a second bottle. Guests of the inn and citizens of the town came into the big room in pairs and groups.

  “Saturday night,” Anna remarked. “It’s always like this.”

  At ten o’clock the innkeeper brought out his collection of big band records, and there was dancing in a glassed-in terrace that overlooked the square. Fergus danced with Barbara, then with Anna.

  “I like your wife,” she said.

  “I like your village. I think we’ll be happy here.”

  “I suspect you’re happy everywhere.”

  “Happy enough,” he said, cautiously. “We have a taste for small things.”

  “Here you can make a lot out of a little. Old tragedies like the news vendor’s. His father had a fit and chopped off his fingers when he was twelve …”

  “Good Lord.” The music stopped.

  “He speaks half a dozen languages, more when he’s sober. Life’s a game to him.”

  Music again: the big band records repeated. Couples again took the floor. Fergus smiled at the people he’d already met and wondered which would become intimates, which only friends.

  “What other scandals can you tell me?” he asked.

  “Bernard and I are a bit of a scandal … not being married, you know.”

  “I didn’t know. That’s not much of a scandal these days,” he said lightly.

  She gave him an offended stare. Though the floor had become crowded, he maneuvered her sideways, backward, forward, without colliding with anyone. He had always been a skillful dancer.

  “I am married,” she said at last. “Bernard isn’t. I’ve seen you watching the photographs. Isn’t she pretty?”

  “She is your image.”

  “We lived in Paris. My husband owned jewelry shops. I designed brooches, necklaces. Ten years ago Bernard persuaded me to move in with him. I thought to divorce.”

  Divorce was not on his list of unbearables; it was simply unthinkable. “Custody?” he asked.

  “We’d divide her.”

  “She liked dolls.”

  “She was careless with the antiques.”

  “Yes, well …”

  “The bastard sent the whole collection in a taxi across town,” she said, heatedly now. “As if they were groceries. He sold his business, and decamped with our daughter. I traced them to New York but never any further.”

  “That’s kidnapping,” Fergus said. “It can’t be done.”

  “No? It was done.”

  “She would be … eighteen?”

  “She is eighteen,” Anna chided softly.

  The song had not ended but they had stopped dancing. He stood with his heels together, stiff as a palace guard. Her fingers caressed the silk of her skirt. He took her right hand in his left and placed his own right on the small of her back and moved forward lightly, mechanically. “You and Bernard were young enough to have children together.”

  “Oh, young enough,” she said, and nodded; this time she was not offended. “But I would have no further children until my first child was returned. Loyalty. It’s how I’m made.”

  She smiled that brave little smile. Her spite uncoiled like a paper snake; Fergus felt its twitch. He imagined Bernard beset by his own longings: raising a rifle to his shoulder and training its sight on the hollow of her neck … Because the music was ending at last, and because Anna’s outdated dress demanded some appreciative flourish, Fergus whirled her once and then urged her backward over his left arm. He did not bend over her as custom demanded, but instead looked fiercely at Barbara and the toyman standing profile to profile against the floodlit square.

  BARBARA FELT THE BEAM cast by his eyes, and turned to face it. He was holding Anna so oddly, like a garment. Anna, one hand clawing his upper arm, righted herself, looking aggrieved. Barbara tactfully shifted her own gaze to the square, where smoke rose from the pipes of standing men; and a café waiter stacked chairs, one on top of another on top of another; and the news vendor, the hour of repose come round, lifted the handles of the barrow and trundled it across the cobblestones, his footfalls managing to keep time with the church clock;
ten unsteady steps … click; ten steps … click; ten steps …

  “Tomorrow is Sunday,” she heard Fergus loudly saying. His shoulder brushed hers. “We have to call the States early, because of the time difference,” he said, somehow getting it wrong even after all these years, or pretending to; anyway, he rushed her away from their new friends with only the skimpiest of good-byes.

  FERGUS, IN PAJAMAS, sat on the billowing quilt, clipping his toenails into the wastebasket. Barbara, in her nightgown, brushed her short hair.

  “I thought they’d lost her,” he said.

  “They lost sight of her.”

  “Bernard, a bereaved father, I thought. Well, bereaved in a way. His children were never allowed to be born.” He got up and moved the wastebasket back to the corner of the room and put the clippers on the highboy.

  “He’s made other people’s children his,” Barbara said. Fergus, considering, put his elbow on the highboy. “A reasonable alternative to the terrors of parenthood, some would say,” she added.

  He gave her a look of distaste.

  She countered with one of boldness. “Maybe even preferable.” “Some would say,” he hurried to supply, sparing her the necessity of repeating the phrase, she who had experienced mother-hood’s joys in such reassuring milieus—just listen to that faithful clock. “Well, we know better,” he said.

  And waited for her assent.

  And waited.

  TESS

  NO MATTER HOW EARLY the hospital counsel gets to work—and he is very early this Tuesday in May—the attending physicians are there already, each of their unremarkable cars in its assigned place in the garage. The nurses have also arrived, the counsel knows; but most of them travel by bus. The clowns’ purple wagon is parked at an annoying diagonal, occupying two spaces. Maintenance should speak to those jokers. The bicycles of the residents are chained tightly to posts.

  The counsel locks his car and moves swiftly through the garage. Within its gloom his fair hair looks like dust. His first task today is to draft a preliminary argument, and it will take several hours. The hospital is at last going to sue the state for reimbursement for Tess—poor Tess, the counsel thinks; pretty Tess.