Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

“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.