Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

Her kind aunt and uncle sent her to university in Budapest. She studied science. But she could barely breathe in the city; she missed the holy forest air. Amid ordinary citizens she felt misplaced, even stolen. Her voice retreated into her larynx. She recognized solitaries like herself — the man who repaired her shoes, a woman in the park with a wondering look, a mathematics professor. But solitaries don’t gather; someone must collect them.

She managed to stay long enough to earn her degree. Then she went home.

“I will live here,” she told them.

“Oh, dearest, stay in the city, teach, marry. Why did we work except to spare you drudgery.”

“This is my place.”

“So much to do,” they said, and sighed. “A lonely business, you have seen that,” they said. “It is necessary to keep distant from guests, from staff …”

“Yes,” she breathed.

She began as housemaid, at her own request. She scoured the stone floor of the kitchen; she learned the rudiments of the electrician’s trade, the plumber’s, the accountant’s. Her uncle and aunt died, one after the other in the same month. She cried for the old man and she cried for the old lady. But her tears were without salt.

Gradually the inn’s patronage changed. Unimaginative guests gave way to guests with secrets. Families yielded to isolates. Some people brought their own quilts; one old woman who came every summer carried a set of saucepans. Exhausted men drove up and deposited some relative for an unspecified amount of time. Word had gotten around as it always did, carried from village to village like legends brought by midwives — that place near the bridge: odd people could be themselves there.

The staff changed, too. One day the ancient handyman, often drunk anyway, dropped foaming to the ground. Two days later the new one arrived, thighs flapping against each other. Sitting with Miss Huk in the book room, his eyes blue lanterns, he offered the information that he had been accused of unhealthy practices.

“Peeping,” she guessed.

“Yes. Because I like to sit alone in parks, within arcades, on river-banks. I have no worse habits, no tendency. But the children … they tease me. Then they report me.”

She hired him. She pensioned off the old cook. The new cook appeared, her face presented like a hatchet or the result of a hatcheting. The drifty-eyed kitchen maid appeared.

There was so much to do, so blessed much. Food, wine, towels; the register; windowpanes. Now she opened the ledger. Robertson Albrecht had withdrawn to a chair with a book, leaving her to her empire. There were bills to pay. There were new guests to get ready for — the bird-watchers, and a fat English couple with three kids. They came every year. The kids were foster children they had managed to adopt, the mother confided … confided to anybody who’d listen, in tones of urgent secrecy. “Only here do we feel like a family.”

THREE O’CLOCK WAS A LOW TIME for everyone at the inn. Andrei stopped practicing and got into bed. The cook smoked outside. The handyman went somewhere. Guests retreated to their rooms or to the baths.

Often at three Miss Huk went into the kitchen. The kitchen maid was usually sitting beside the discolored samovar. She produced her shy smile. Miss Huk drew a chair up to the table, its top a thick slab for chopping. A cleaver hung from a loop strapped to its side.

Three drifted to three fifteen, to three thirty, to three forty-five. Things began to stir again. Andrei’s afternoon sadness lessened, and he got out of bed. Sometimes the Sklar taxi brought a guest or retrieved one, and the driver came into the kitchen for a drop. The handyman reappeared, lugging a barrel. His form was not ungainly or unsatisfactory, Miss Huk thought: just another way for a man to be. Some nights, tuxedoed behind the bar, his beardless face slightly moist, his lips slightly red, he looked like a beautiful woman in drag.

Today, through the window, she saw him at the woodpile with his ax. A figure moved toward him. Robertson Albrecht. A polite exchange — she could imagine it. I need the exercise; may I? Certainly, sir. The American raised the ax, his muscles alive under their layer of unimportant fat, and he struck, and the wood split as if it were in his thrall.

At four the bell rang in the kitchen. The little kitchen maid carried tea and cake to the parlor. A few minutes later: “A royal banquet,” Andrei exclaimed to Miss Huk, who had slipped into her place behind the register. He said the same thing almost every day. The Norwegian S. smiled at Andrei, exposing long gray teeth. “Oh, join us, Miss Huk,” said the Scottish S.

“I’ve had tea, thank you.” She had in fact had no tea, had communed with the kitchen maid without benefit of nourishment or words; but it would soon be time for a real drink. The little group warmed itself at the hearth. The handyman, now in his monkey suit, opened the bar. A Belgian came down the stairs. The topologist came down. Another Belgian came down. Lars crawled in from the book room — were there woodworms there? oh Lord. The third Belgian appeared. Everyone was assembled except the senior Albrechts — but, no, they were there, standing by the window, so solid, how could she not have seen them come in.

III.

ON FRIDAY, at that low hour of three, Miss Huk climbed to the handyman’s room to deliver his linens. She laid the pile of sheets and towels on his cot … soft stuff, so that his sensitive skin would not pucker.

The turret had four windows, one on each side. Three of them looked out on glistening green boughs. From the fourth you could see Sklar in the distance. If you looked directly downward, you saw the kitchen garden and the little parking area. Only the inn’s pickup truck stood there now. The Albrechts’ rented sedan was gone, she saw.

And she saw the stranger: thin black hair combed over a shining pate. She leaned forward for a better look and smacked her forehead on the handyman’s window. She backed away and lifted his binoculars from the dresser.

Flat ears. A tan scarf. A bony face. A pointed black beard.

A scientist, you’d think.

He waited, this seeming scientist, his hands loose at his thighs, beside a birch tree. When Lars crawled into the parking lot the man pursed his thin lips. Lars did not raise his head at the whistle. But he got to his feet. He approached the stranger. He stopped at the usual distance of a foot and a half.

The man’s lips moved in speech. Lars listened. They both squatted, and the man produced his own magnifying glass. More talk, more listening. When the man stood and walked toward the road, Lars followed.

Man walking, boy trailing; and both disappeared from Miss Huk’s view.

She inhaled sharply, producing only a light whistle. She did nothing else. The inn allowed guests to do as they pleased. Children were the responsibility of their parents.

So she stood there, thinking of the stories she had read aloud. The merchant who traded his gold for a pair of wings. She had found that old book a few days ago. The brothers who mistakenly killed each other in darkness. She had offered to read to Lars. The peasants’ sons who went out to seek their fortunes and had succeeded or failed. Lars had given her a hard look and scuttled away. The starling whose song shattered the mirror that was the world, and so the world had to begin again.

She was still at the window.

But the little figure: how brief his stay.

“You move like lightning,” Uncle Huk had marveled.

She could still do that. In a minute she was on the second floor, then the first. The cook was not in the kitchen. The handyman was elsewhere. S. and S. sat in the parlor with their embroidery. The topologist amiably manned the registration desk. “The telephone rang,” he said. “I took a reservation.” Miss Huk, on her way upstairs again, bowed her gratitude. She knocked on Andrei’s door. Oh, he’d hate this. But: “Yes,” he called. She flew in, and there he was, and the kitchen maid was with him, her round face registering Miss Huk’s entry without alarm.