“Nothing to it at all.” Krovitch took a deep breath and exhaled, wiping his face with a huge handkerchief. “Fabian, this very morning I shuffled through a stack of Billboard magazines that high. In the year 1934 I found an interesting article concerning an act which played on a second-rate circuit, known as Fabian and Sweet William. Sweet William was a little boy dummy. There was a girl assistant—Ilyana Riamonova. No picture of her in the article, but I at least had a name, the name of a real person, to go on. It was simple to check police files then and dig up this picture. The resemblance, needless to say, between the live woman on one hand and the puppet on the other is nothing short of incredible. Suppose you go back and tell your story over again, Fabian.”
“She was my assistant, that’s all. I simply used her as a model.”
“You’re making me sweat,” said the detective. “Do you think I’m a fool? Do you think I don’t know love when I see it? I’ve watched you handle the marionette, I’ve seen you talk to it, I’ve seen how you make it react to you. You’re in love with the puppet naturally, because you loved the original woman very, very much. I’ve lived too long not to sense that. Hell, Fabian, stop fencing around.”
Fabian lifted his pale slender hands, turned them over, examined them and let them fall.
“All right. In 1934 I was billed as Fabian and Sweet William. Sweet William was a small bulb-nosed boy dummy I carved a long time ago. I was in Los Angeles when this girl appeared at the stage door one night. She’d followed my work for years. She was desperate for a job and she hoped to be my assistant.…”
He remembered her in the half-light of the alley behind the theater and how startled he was at her freshness and eagerness to work with and for him and the way the cool rain touched softly down through the narrow alleyway and caught in small spangles through her hair, melting in dark warmness, and the rain beaded upon her white porcelain hand holding her coat together at her neck.
He saw her lips’ motion in the dark and her voice, separated off on another sound track, it seemed, speaking to him in the autumn wind, and he remembered that without his saying yes or no or perhaps she was suddenly on the stage with him, in the great pouring bright light, and in two months he, who had always prided himself on his cynicism and disbelief, had stepped off the rim of the world after her, plunging down a bottomless place of no limit and no light anywhere.
Arguments followed, and more than arguments—things said and done that lacked all sense and sanity and fairness. She had edged away from him at last, causing his rages and remarkable hysterias. Once he burned her entire wardrobe in a fit of jealousy. She had taken this quietly. But then one night he handed her a week’s notice, accused her of monstrous disloyalty, shouted at her, seized her, slapped her again and again across the face, bullied her about and thrust her out the door, slamming it!
She disappeared that night.
When he found the next day that she was really gone and there was nowhere to find her, it was like standing in the center of a titanic explosion. All the world was smashed flat and all the echoes of the explosion came back to reverberate at midnight, at four in the morning, at dawn, and he was up early, stunned with the sound of coffee simmering and the sound of matches being struck and cigarettes lit and himself trying to shave and looking at mirrors that were sickening in their distortion.
He clipped out all the advertisements that he took in the papers and pasted them in neat rows in a scrapbook—all the ads describing her and telling about her and asking for her back. He even put a private detective on the case. People talked. The police dropped by to question him. There was more talk.
But she was gone like a piece of white incredibly fragile tissue paper, blown over the sky and down. A record of her was sent to the largest cities, and that was the end of it for the police. But not for Fabian. She might be dead or just running away, but wherever she was he knew that somehow and in some way he would have her back.
One night he came home, bringing his own darkness with him, and collapsed upon a chair, and before he knew it he found himself speaking to Sweet William in the totally black room.
“William, it’s all over and done. I can’t keep it up!”
And William cried, “Coward! Coward!” from the air above his head, out of the emptiness. “You can get her back if you want!”
Sweet William squeaked and clappered at him in the night. “Yes, you can! Think!” he insisted. “Think of a way. You can do it. Put me aside, lock me up. Start all over.”
“Start all over?”
“Yes,” whispered Sweet William, and darkness moved within darkness. “Yes. Buy wood. Buy fine new wood. Buy hard-grained wood. Buy beautiful fresh new wood. And carve. Carve slowly and carve carefully. Whittle away. Cut delicately. Make the little nostrils so. And cut her thin black eyebrows round and high, so, and make her cheeks in small hollows. Carve, carve …”
“No! It’s foolish. I could never do it!”
“Yes. you could. Yes you could, could, could, could …”
The voice faded, a ripple of water in an underground stream. The stream rose up and swallowed him. His head fell forward. Sweet William sighed. And then the two of them lay like stones buried under a waterfall.
The next morning, John Fabian bought the hardest, finest-grained piece of wood that he could find and brought it home and laid it on the table, but could not touch it. He sat for hours staring at it. It was impossible to think that out of this cold chunk of material he expected his hands and his memory to re-create something warm and pliable and familiar. There was no way even faintly to approximate that quality of rain and summer and the first powderings of snow upon a clear pane of glass in the middle of a December night. No way, no way at all to catch the snowflake without having it melt swiftly in your clumsy fingers.
And yet Sweet William spoke out, sighing and whispering, after midnight, “You can do it. Oh, yes, yes, you can do it!”
And so he began. It took him an entire month to carve her hands into things as natural and beautiful as shells lying in the sun. Another month and the skeleton, like a fossil imprint he was searching out, stamped and hidden in the wood, was revealed, all febrile and so infinitely delicate as to suggest the veins in the white flesh of an apple.
And all the while Sweet William lay mantled in dust in his box that was fast becoming a very real coffin. Sweet William croaking and wheezing some feeble sarcasm, some sour criticism, some hint, some help, but dying all the time, fading, soon to be untouched, soon to be like a sheath molted in summer and left behind to blow in the wind.
As the weeks passed and Fabian molded and scraped and polished the new wood, Sweet William lay longer and longer in stricken silence, and one day as Fabian held the puppet in his hand Sweet William seemed to look at him a moment with puzzled eyes and then there was a death rattle in his throat.
And Sweet William was gone.
Now as he worked, a fluttering, a faint motion of speech began far back in his throat, echoing and re-echoing, speaking silently like a breeze among dry leaves. And then for the first time he held the doll in a certain way in his hands and memory moved down his arms and into his fingers and from his fingers into the hollowed wood and the tiny hands flickered and the body became suddenly soft and pliable and her eyes opened and looked up at him.
And the small mouth opened the merest fraction of an inch and she was ready to speak and he knew all of the things that she must say to him, he knew the first and the second and the third things he would have her say. There was a whisper, a whisper, a whisper.
The tiny head turned this way gently, that way gently. The mouth half opened again and began to speak. And as it spoke he bent his head and he could feel the warm breath—of course it was there!—coming from her mouth, and when he listened very carefully, holding her to his head, his eyes shut, wasn’t it there, too, softly, gently—the beating of her heart?
Krovitch sat in a chair for a full minute after Fabian stopped talking. Finally he said, “I see. And
your wife?”
“Alyce? She was my second assistant, of course. She worked very hard and, God help her, she loved me. It’s hard now to know why I ever married her. It was unfair of me.”
“What about the dead man—Ockham?”
“I never saw him before you showed me his body in the theater basement yesterday.”?
“Fabian,” said the detective.
“It’s the truth!”
“Fabian.”
“The truth, the truth, damn it, I swear it’s the truth!”
“The truth.” There was a whisper like the sea coming in on the gray shore at early morning. The water was ebbing in a fine lace on the sand. The sky was cold and empty. There were no people on the shore. The sun was gone. And the whisper said again, “The truth.”
Fabian sat up straight and took hold of his knees with his thin hands. His face was rigid. Krovitch found himself making the same motion he had made the day before—looking at the gray ceiling as if it were a November sky and a lonely bird going over and away, gray within the cold grayness.
“The truth.” Fading. “The truth.”
Krovitch lifted himself and moved as carefully as he could to the far side of the dressing room where the golden box lay open and inside the box the thing that whispered and talked and could laugh sometimes and could sometimes sing. He carried the golden box over and set it down in front of Fabian and waited for him to put his living hand within the gloved delicate hollowness, waited for the fine small mouth to quiver and the eyes to focus. He did not have to wait long.
“The first letter came a month ago.”
“No.”
“The first letter came a month ago.”
“No, no!”
“The letter said, ‘Riabouchinska, born 1914, died 1934. Born again in 1935.’ Mr. Ockham was a juggler. He’d been on the same bill with John and Sweet William years before. He remembered that once there had been a woman, before there was a puppet.”
“No, that’s not true!”
“Yes,” said the voice.
Snow was falling in silences and even deeper silences through the dressing room. Fabian’s mouth trembled. He stared at the blank walls as if seeking some new door by which to escape. He half rose from his chair. “Please …”
“Ockham threatened to tell about us to everyone in the world.”
Krovitch saw the doll quiver, saw the fluttering of the lips, saw Fabian’s eyes widen and fix and his throat convulse and tighten as if to stop the whispering.
“I—I was in the room when Mr. Ockham came. I lay in my box and I listened and heard, and I know.” The voice blurred, then recovered and went on. “Mr. Ockham threatened to tear me up, burn me into ashes if John didn’t pay him a thousand dollars. Then suddenly there was a falling sound. A cry. Mr. Ockham’s head must have struck the floor. I heard John cry out and I heard him swearing, I heard him sobbing. I heard a gasping and a choking sound.”
“You heard nothing! You’re deaf, you’re blind! You’re wood!” cried Fabian.
“But I hear!” she said, and stopped as if someone had put a hand to her mouth.
Fabian had leaped to his feet now and stood with the doll in his hand. The mouth clapped twice, three times, then finally made words. “The choking sound stopped. I heard John drag Mr. Ockham down the stairs under the theater to the old dressing rooms that haven’t been used in years. Down, down, down I heard them going away and away—down …”
Krovitch stepped back as if he were watching a motion picture that had suddenly grown monstrously tall. The figures terrified and frightened him, they were immense, they towered! They threatened to inundate him with size. Someone had turned up the sound so that it screamed.
He saw Fabian’s teeth, a grimace, a whisper, a clenching. He saw the man’s eyes squeeze shut.
Now the soft voice was so high and faint it trembled toward nothingness.
“I’m not made to live this way. This way. There’s nothing for us now. Everyone will know, everyone will. Even when you killed him and I lay asleep last night, I dreamed. I knew, I realized. We both knew, we both realized that these would be our last days, our last hours. Because while I’ve lived with your weakness and I’ve lived with your lies, I can’t live with something that kills and hurts in killing. There’s no way to go on from here. How can I live alongside such knowledge? …”
Fabian held her into the sunlight which shone dimly through the small dressing-room window. She looked at him and there was nothing in her eyes. His hand shook and in shaking made the marionette tremble, too. Her mouth closed and opened, closed and opened, closed and opened, again and again and again. Silence.
Fabian moved his fingers unbelievingly to his own mouth. A film slid across his eyes. He looked like a man lost in the street, trying to remember the number of a certain house, trying to find a certain window with a certain light. He swayed about, staring at the walls, at Krovitch, at the doll, at his free hand, turning the fingers over, touching his throat, opening his mouth. He listened.
Miles away in a cave, a single wave came in from the sea and whispered down in foam. A gull moved soundlessly, not beating its wings—a shadow.
“She’s gone. She’s gone. I can’t find her. She’s run off. I can’t find her. I can’t find her. I try, I try, but she’s run away off far. Will you help me? Will you help me find her? Will you help me find her? Will you please help me find her?”
Riabouchinska slipped bonelessly from his limp hand, folded over and glided noiselessly down to lie upon the cold floor, her eyes closed, her mouth shut.
Fabian did not look at her as Krovitch led him out the door.
The Beggar on O’connell Bridge
“A fool,” I said. “That’s what I am.”
“Why?” asked my wife. “What for?”
I brooded by our third-floor hotel window. On the Dublin street below, a man passed, his face to the lamplight.
“Him,” I muttered. “Two days ago …”
Two days ago, as I was walking along, someone had hissed at me from the hotel alley. “Sir, it’s important! Sir!”
I turned into the shadow. This little man, in the direst tones, said, “I’ve a job in Belfast if I just had a pound for the train fare!”
I hesitated.
“A most important job!” he went on swiftly. “Pays well! I’ll—I’ll mail you back the loan! Just give me your name and hotel.”
He knew me for a tourist. It was too late, his promise to pay had moved me. The pound note crackled in my hand, being worked free from several others.
The man’s eye skimmed like a shadowing hawk.
“And if I had two pounds, why, I could eat on the way.”
I uncrumpled two bills.
“And three pounds would bring the wife, not leave her here alone.”
I unleafed a third.
“Ah, hell!” cried the man. “Five, just five poor pounds, would find us a hotel in that brutal city, and let me get to the job, for sure!”
What a dancing fighter he was, light on his toes, in and out, weaving, tapping with his hands, flicking with his eyes, smiling with his mouth, jabbing with his tongue.
“Lord thank you, bless you, sir!”
He ran, my five pounds with him.
I was half in the hotel before I realized that, for all his vows, he had not recorded my name.
“Gah!” I cried then.
“Gah!” I cried now, my wife behind me, at the window.
For there, passing below, was the very fellow who should have been in Belfast two nights ago.
“Oh, I know him,” said my wife. “He stopped me this noon. Wanted train fare to Galway.”
“Did you give it to him?”
“No,” said my wife simply.
Then the worst thing happened. The demon far down on the sidewalk glanced up, saw us and damn if he didn’t wave!
I had to stop myself from waving back. A sickly grin played on my lips.
“It’s got so I hate to leave the hotel,
” I said.
“It’s cold out, all right.” My wife was putting on her coat.
“No,” I said. “Not the cold. Them.”
And we looked again from the window.
There was the cobbled Dublin street with the night wind blowing in a fine soot along one way to Trinity College, another to St. Stephen’s Green. Across by the sweetshop two men stood mummified in the shadows. On the corner a single man, hands deep in his pockets, felt for his entombed bones, a muzzle of ice for a beard. Farther up, in a doorway, was a bundle of old newspapers that would stir like a pack of mice and wish you the time of evening if you walked by. Below, by the hotel entrance, stood a feverish hothouse rose of a woman with a mysterious bundle.
“Oh, the beggars,” said my wife.
“No, not just ‘oh, the beggars,’ ” I said, “but oh, the people in the streets, who somehow became beggars.”
“It looks like a motion picture. All of them waiting down there in the dark for the hero to come out.”
“The hero,” I said. “That’s me, damn it.”
My wife peered at me. “You’re not afraid of them?”
“Yes, no. Hell. It’s that woman with the bundle who’s worst. She’s a force of nature, she is. Assaults you with her poverty. As for the others—well, it’s a big chess game for me now. We’ve been in Dublin what, eight weeks? Eight weeks I’ve sat up here with my typewriter, studying their off hours and on. When they take a coffee break I take one, run for the sweetshop, the bookstore, the Olympia Theatre. If I time it right, there’s no handout, no my wanting to trot them into the barbershop or the kitchen. I know every secret exit in the hotel.”
“Lord,” said my wife, “you sound driven.”
“I am. But most of all by that beggar on O’Connell Bridge!”
“Which one?”
“Which one indeed. He’s a wonder, a terror. I hate him, I love him. To see is to disbelieve him. Come on.”
The elevator, which had haunted its untidy shaft for a hundred years, came wafting skyward, dragging its ungodly chains and dread intestines after. The door exhaled open. The lift groaned as if we had trod its stomach. In a great protestation of ennui, the ghost sank back toward earth, us in it.