The Way Through Doors (26 page)

The inside of the den was cozy as could be. A little window was set in the side of a hill, and it shone down through onto a little kitchen. A wooden table was pressed up against the wall with chairs. It was heaped with every comforting sort of food that the young man had ever imagined, scones and pancakes and Danish, doughnuts and waffles and cookies, a turkey, a ham, a London broil, baked breads of every description, butters and cheeses and sausages.

—Sit, please, said the man.

Then out from an inner room rushed the children, and after them the wife, a slender woman with a soft fur that bristled ever so slightly in the wind. Her husband took off his hat, and his muzzle was a proud and handsome muzzle. The children sat about the young man with the gray-blue suit and they asked him for things, and everything that he was asked for he had somehow to give them. One asked him for a pocketknife, and he gave the little fox a pocketknife. Another asked him for a disguise box, and the young man took from his coat a disguise box, ready-made in Switzerland in 1932, of the very best quality, number seven of twenty-six ever made. The third fox-boy asked him for a kite, and from a secret pocket the young man with the gray-blue suit drew forth a fighting kite made in Japan, a kite that would allow the young fox upon a trip to some distant fox-meadow, where foxes kite and play in the windy autumn, to cut the strings of others foxes’ kites, and watch them plummet to earth, all the while laughing in that peculiar fox way and dancing about on one’s hind legs.

As well, the young man had brought a gift for the fox-wife, a great pottery bowl blessed within it with the image of a morning town.

The town was beautiful, and no one could say its name until the fox himself roused himself from a sudden sort of slumber and said,

—That is Som, where sometimes I have been.

The young man said then that he would rather go there than anywhere, and the fox leaped upon him with his rows of teeth and sharpness and great fox-suddenness and strength and tore open his throat. Then into the bowl the young man’s life poured, and it filled the bowl all the way to the brim, and there was in the town of Som a great eruption, and a statue in the westward-tending square facing the west road burst open, the old statue of Marionette. Out of it stepped the municipal inspector.

He leaped down to the ground and surveyed the square. People had come out of stores and houses and were staring at him strangely. He felt at his throat. The skin was unbroken. He brushed the stone dust off the arms and legs of his clothing, and crossed the square towards the little alley that led along the backs of houses to another thoroughfare that in time would reach the road upon which sat the inn. And so in time, a minute or two of walking followed by a moment, and that moment followed by a long moment of thought concerning the depth of a well he had seen once in passing from a horse, and how wells seem different from horseback than they do from afoot, and how they seem different to grown men than to children, and how perhaps the feelings of men and children for wells might not prove a good index for how life has changed a man in general, the better to judge how he might return once again to his grander beginnings. And then he was before the inn.

He approached the door. It was a dark wood, and said something on it in a language that no one living now spoke. He opened the door and entered. To his right there was a bat, leaning against the door. The common room was full of voices. A bearded man came around the bar.

—Hello, he said. You are not early, but you are not so late, either.

The man had a funny look in his eye.

—I am going upstairs, said Selah.

—I expect you are, said the man.

In the background, Selah could see a dog standing upon its hind legs playing upon a fiddle a song he remembered. Another man sat in the corner facing the corner with a sadness of corners and places of ending that Selah could not look long upon. About this man too there was the filthy rag of squandered luck. Selah turned from him then and sprang up the stairs. Yes, up the stairs and onto the landing. This place was as familiar to him now as the house in which he had been born, a little clapboard farmhouse on the edges of a great lake, where questions were often asked, but rarely answered, in training for a larger world.

Selah burst through the door he had so long been standing somehow impossibly before.

In the room, a beautiful woman was sitting upon a rocking chair. She was sewing something, and her needle never ceased its movements, back and forth, darting implacably through the pierced and repierced cloth.

—You are Selah, she said. I am Ilsa Marionette. I did not think you would come through the statue of my father.

—I’m sorry, said Selah. I did not know it was his statue.

—There are many, she said. It is a good use for a statue, and one to which no statue has ever been put. I think he would be glad to have been a part of it. Grace in circumstance, he always said, was the true matter of life.

—Where is Mora? asked Selah.

For the girl was nowhere in the room.

—She has gone, said Ilsa. She waited quite a while, you know.

Ilsa narrowed her eyes.

—Quite a while.

—I came as soon as I could, said Selah. No one else could have come sooner or swifter. Where has she gone?

Ilsa Marionette smiled, and her smile was the delight of a thousand children placed all in a row in a happy and enduring place.

—Selah Morse, she said. Was Mora ever here? Did she ever come to fetch me away from my husband? Are you not tired from speaking so long? Sleep beckons from every cabinet, from every bed, from every scrap of cloth. Sleep beckons from trunks, from windows, from tree limbs and pie safes. Beneath doors sleep beckons. You are tired, yes. You have spoken so long now. Mora was here, she was here, but she has gone. For an instant she faltered in her thought, and disappeared.

There is a chance, however.

Her voice had changed slightly. She had remembered something hopeful.

—There was a little rabbit made of knotted hair…do you still have it?

Selah desperately checked his pockets and then all of his secret pockets. The rabbit was nowhere to be found.

—No, he said. No! It seems to be missing.

—Then there is no hope, said Ilsa Marionette. I don’t know what to tell you. I wish it were otherwise. You will never find her. Instead you will continue day and night through nineteen versions of confusion, becoming each day less than you were the day before. Eventually there will be nothing left of Selah Morse. Not even the ink of your calling card.

Selah stood then, looking into the perfect symmetry of Ilsa Marionette. There was nothing there, no clue to any possible solution.

—What of your husband? said Selah. He’s downstairs even now.

Ilsa held a piece of embroidery in her hands. It was a dog chasing a dog who was chasing the first dog unsuccessfully.

—If we can both forgive each other, there is a chance we might begin again, she said.

Just then the guess artist entered the room.

—My friend, said Selah, his voice choked. Mora’s gone away.

The guess artist put his arm around Selah.

—Is she really gone? he asked.

—Ilsa says that—

—Aren’t you tired? interrupted Ilsa. Haven’t you been speaking for a very long time?

Then the guess artist interrupted, making a loud, galloping, grinning noise. There was suddenly out of nowhere a broad and manifest delight in the depths of his face.

—What is it? asked Selah. Tell me, my comrade, tell me, my brother in arms, you who accompanied me through the snows of the Russian winter, tell me what you see.

It was difficult then for the world to bear the disparity between Selah’s grief and the guess artist’s happiness, so close together and impossibly cleaved they were. The room shuddered a little, and a lamp went out. Ilsa unshuttered the window and was profiled against it.

—They were a long time in the room at the top of the stairs, said the guess artist. She had been struck by a car that had come from nowhere and gone away afterwards to nowhere. She had been taken to a hospital by a young man whom she had never met. There she had been taken care of well, and it had been found that her memory was lost, perhaps for good, and she had left that place in the company of the young man who had found her. Together they had gone back to the young man’s rooms, where his printing press and lithograph machine and the tools of his trade were arrayed all about the spaces and belongings that made up his life. Amidst all this, he gave the girl a cool drink, and then began to speak to her in a layered, tortuous fashion, keeping always her past, and the things that might have been, foremost in his mind. He arrayed before her all the objects of his hope, all the things he wished had been and were, and so then they became what was real, and not imagined, and he placed his life in the context of hers, and together they drifted, questing, through the half-light, his resourcefulness all that stood between themselves and the devil, sleep. And when morning came and the sun arose in the east, the young man was speaking still, and the girl was still and slowly, beautifully, upon his arm, eyes wide, listening carefully to each syllable, carefully to each phrase and word and worded phrase. The whole was sewn together with paragraphs and dashes and went in a whirl around a pamphlet that the young man had made in truth, a pamphlet named WORLD’S FAIR 7 JUNE 1978. And the young man saw that the sun had risen, and the girl saw it too, and there was in their hearts a lightness and a pleasure with the things of this world, and they rose up from where they had been sitting and went down to the street and out into the morning city.

—Selah, said the girl Mora Klein, where shall we go?

—To the boardwalk, said Selah. It is proper there in morning, with the edges of things curled up. One can look underneath.

—I imagine, now, said Mora, that a taxi will draw up to the curb and we will get into it and the windows will be wide-open and we will drive brilliantly through the streets all the way to Coney Island in a swirling and impetuous fashion, and though things will rise up to stop us, nothing will have any power over a passage as splendid and daring as ours.

A taxi drew up then to the curb, and Mora and Selah got in. They hung from the wide-open windows as it drove at blinding speed through the streets and across a bridge and swept down Atlantic Avenue, down through Brooklyn to that always faraway and close Coney Island.

Then they alighted upon another curb and paid the cabbie with a gold doubloon, and ran up to the timbered boardwalk and the morning sand and mist upon the water.

—Selah, said Mora cautiously, her voice trembling. What about Sif? Is she real? Is she the girl you love? Or is she a version of myself that you invented for me, like the carefullest, most special set of clothes that anyone ever made?

—Sif, said Selah, is the girl I invented in order to fall in love with. I wrote a pamphlet about her in the hopes that she might be. You are the girl who was struck by a car, sent up through the air to land upon her head. You have yet to become what you will become.

—Then I may be Sif Aloud, and I may be Mora Klein, and I may be whom I like, said Mora. I may even be Rita the message-girl, though she gets the worst of it sometimes, always stuck in the ministry offices, never allowed to leave.

—Rita gets to leave, said Selah. Whenever she wants to. If you want, I can introduce you. She’s awfully nice.

Mora pulled Selah down to her and kissed him full on the mouth, and he was surprised with the ferocity of the gesture. He ran his hand along her back, and delight coursed along his arm.

—Let us make a pact, she said. To madness at every juncture!

—To madness! said Selah.

They were very close together, and this was immensely pleasing to the both of them. She pushed her face and cheek against his very hard, and he pushed back. What a creature! he thought. He shielded his eyes with his hand and looked up and down the boardwalk.

—I am going to get some breakfast for us. I will be back in a minute.

—Then we will meet over there, said Mora, pointing to a place on the beach. Let us agree to say when you return with our breakfast that you have been gone a month. This month to come will be my secret month, one of the two months that Eila Amblin slept. For even a girl without a memory should have secrets that she knows. She of all people for whom everything is a secret.

—But how will you live for a month? asked Selah.

He felt the hot morning sun on his face, and it was good. He could feel the circumstances all around him easing. And before him, this trick-some, winsome girl.

—A month is not so long when it is morning time, she said. Go get breakfast, and I will sit here looking out to sea like a widow whose sailor husband died in a storm long ago, although she is still young.

—Grand, said Selah. That is just what I was thinking it would be like.

He handed her the pamphlet,
WF 7 J 1978,
which he had in his pocket.

—Here is something to read, he said. I haven’t finished it yet. Mostly there are just schematics, no writing.

Mora was still wearing the dress that she had worn when the car had struck her, when he had first seen her standing staring up at the apartment. It was a fine affair, and left her shoulders bare. This drew him to her like a magnet. He kissed her again.