Jesse Ball - The Way Through Doors

— It was no trouble, says the man from beneath his hat. I had supposed that a person would come out from that door one day, and years without end I have walked only upon this road home so that every day there would be a chance that someone waiting to be let out might be let out by me. There are not many who walk upon this road. I have thought often of how it would be. Always in my idea of this moment, the door opened. Out stepped a man in a gray-blue suit, serious-looking but young, carrying a small slung bag.

— Thank you, said the young man in the gray-blue suit each time he emerged.

— It was no trouble, I replied. Will you come beneath my roof for a fine supper? My children are waiting, and my wife as well, away at the edge of the wood.

— I would like that, said the young man in the gray-blue suit.

We walked then along the path where always and every day I have walked come evening and came then soon to my house, which is truly not a house so much as a den, and came then to my wife and children who are my wife and children but who are also foxes, and who are pleased in themselves to be sometimes people and sometimes foxes, or always fox-people, creating illusion with the sweep of a sly grin.

At the door to my den, the young man said,

— But if I go within, is it certain that I will ever come out?

— Not certain, no, I said. What is certain is that you will go in. I can see it in the tilt of your elbows.

For the young man’s elbows were tilted in an odd sort of way. From looking at them it was obvious the young man was going to enter the den. Enter he did, ducking his head and stepping inside.

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?