Angel in the Parlor (11 page)

What did Mrs. Shore, the banker's wife, size eighteen, coming to have her new coat lengthened, tell the tailor?

“I've been hearing so much about that boy of yours! My husband saw him and his group at the county fair.”

“Oh, you'll be hearing from him one of these days, Mrs. Shore. Any day now, you'll be seeing him on television.”

One day the letter from Albany arrives. Now the boast has come true, Morgon is as nervous as a flea, and he appraises the most casual movements of his son.

What does the tailor see when he looks at his son?

Himself. Younger. Morgon, yes, but he has lost all the heaviness of a Prussian upbringing. Amyas ambles into the shop after school and throws his books on the chair. He is fourteen.

“Did you practice today?” asks the tailor.

“Yes,” says Amyas, pulling a candy bar out of his pocket. He is tall, nearly six feet already, and has an enormous appetite which worries his father.

“Don't eat that,” says the tailor, slapping it out of his son's hand. “You don't want to get fat.”

“I burn it up fast enough, don't I?”

On the television screen, he moves like a flame. Morgon Axel has called all his friends. He brings the portable TV down to the shop, and Tuesday morning they come by to watch. His wife wanted to go to the studio and watch it live but then they would never know how it looked to everyone else. Here they are, the butcher who works in the grocery shop next door, the fellow from the gas station across the street, Amyas's classmates and teachers, and Knute Kristofferson, the old violinist who lives upstairs and doesn't have a color TV. They stand around the set, which Morgon has perched on one of the shelves, having removed the heavy bolts of cloth in honor of the occasion. After a tap-dancing girl and two young boys who play an accordion duet, the master of ceremonies appears on a corrugated pedestal studded with stars. He says something which the tailor barely hears, about the seven members of an acrobatic troupe, led by Amyas Axel. And then suddenly it is he, the fulfillment of all Morgon's dreams, flying like an angel, like an eagle, from intricate trapezes, hanging from the ankles of one boy, jackknifing to another, like a squirrel jumping from tree to tree.

Without fear.

Then all at once the screen goes black.

“Oh!” cries the tailor's wife.

Across the darkened screen appears the words:

Power failure. Please stay tuned.

But though they hover around the set for a quarter of an hour, Amyas does not return, and when the image flashes on, a young girl in a tutu is spinning around on her toes.

In the evening when he's watching television, the tailor sees out of the corner of his eye another performance going on, less important than the one he's watching only because he's not a part of it and it goes on all the time. Amyas on a stool, his legs crooked around the rungs; his mother shelling peas, nodding, listening; the window open, the warm spring air coming through—

You have told us about the tailor and the tailor's wife but very little about Amyas. Who is he?

It is impossible to say for certain, because he's always moving, and his mother's testimony is so different from his father's memories that they might well be describing two different people. Parents seize an image of what they want their children to be, behind which the child moves, trying to fit his body to the shadow-child or hold it up as a shield which lets him grow in secret.

But when Amyas was sixteen, he had nothing in common with this shadow-child. He became a new person. And that is always terrible for the parents, who have chosen someone else.

That is to say, having grown tall he began to grow wide. Enormous. From slim acrobat to a man pregnant with the acrobat that had been himself, for you could see the old Amyas still, in his eyes, in his gestures, and you could hear it in his speech. At the age of sixteen he weighed four hundred pounds, through some imbalance of his body which had been waiting all those years to take away his grace.

The tailor knew nothing of glands and imbalances. He began to loathe the very sight of his son, who seemed to give himself up to the slovenly spirit that had gotten hold of him. Amyas grew a scraggy beard and let his mother trim his hair only around his ears.

It was his mother who made his clothes now—acres of tweed, of gabardine, which heaped the pile behind her like a mountain. The sick child cries out for love. At dinner she saved the best pieces of meat for Amyas, the extra piece of pie. These acts of favoritism enraged the tailor.

“Amyas, you look like a pig. Don't eat like one.”

(Amyas has just dragged his sleeves into his soup. He is not used to his new body.)

“You just want the rest of the blueberry pie for yourself. Be glad you don't have a big belly to fill,” snapped his mother.

She set the piece of pie in front of Amyas. But shame overcame him. He pushed it toward his father. The tailor found that he did not want it either, yet having asked for it, he pretended to eat it with relish.

He knows Amyas is always hungry, and he takes great delight in keeping him that way. Didn't he bring Amyas up in the paths of righteousness and didn't Amyas fail to bloom? In the back of the tailor's mind is a lurking suspicion that his son
could
turn into the old Amyas if he really wanted to, that he's done this to humiliate his father in front of his friends and customers, to whom he has boasted over and over, “One day you'll be seeing him on Broadway.”

You can't spank a child for taking this way to get back at you but you can humiliate him back to his senses. Amyas sits in back of the shop with his mother, helping her ease the weight of that unfinished pile on her soul. The tailor struts around in the front room—yes, he is prouder than ever now—joking with his customers.

“Well, if I can't have an acrobat for a son, I'll have the male Mae West. Sometimes I feel like I'm running a sideshow in here!”

He whispers it into Mrs. Shore's ear, or into Mr. Harris's ear, or into the ears of the young girls who come to have their skirts shortened, and they giggle, for they don't know that it has gone into Amyas's ear also.

There is another voice that only Amyas hears. It tells him to go away, it marshals his father's words and looks together. His mother worries about him, of course, but when she sees he is determined to go, she gives him the names of relatives in the city and a few old friends.

“I'll write,” promises Amyas.

But he never does. And when, after two weeks, his mother writes her friends and her relatives, she finds that Amyas has never stopped there at all. And that's awkward to the tailor, almost as awkward as having his son home, because people are always asking, “How's Amyas doing in the big city?”

“Oh, you can't imagine the tales he writes us. He's doing impersonations now. He has a huge apartment over the club where he works—the Cobra, I think it's called. People come up to his place all hours of the day and night. He told us that one night all the Rockettes showed up in his room with a case of champagne.”

It gave Morgon the fright that comes over a man who discovers he's a prophet, when nearly a year after Amyas left home, Mr. Harris came in one morning to order a tuxedo and remarked to Morgon, who was fitting a sleeve, “I think I saw your son yesterday.”

“Amyas?” squeaked the tailor. “Where?”

The sewing machine in the back room came to a dead halt.

“In a little restaurant on MacDougal Street. I don't remember the name of it—I'd gone there with some friends, and we were having dinner, when suddenly a man came out and announced there would be a floor show. And the act he introduced—well, there was this very large man” (he avoided the word fat) “who came out in pink rompers and played a mandolin and sang. I don't remember what he sang. But he was awfully funny.”

“Amyas doesn't play a mandolin,” said the tailor, trying to calm himself.

“Well, perhaps it wasn't Amyas. But it looked like him. I asked the waiter to tell me the name of the man we were watching. ‘Pretty Baby,' said the waiter, ‘he doesn't call himself anything else. The manager makes his check out to Pretty Baby.' I asked if he played here often, and the waiter shrugged. ‘He comes and goes like the wind. We have people who drop by every night, hoping he'll show up. Sometimes he'll stay away for months.' They say he's turned down a couple of movie contracts.”

When Mr. Harris left, the tailor hurried into the back room. His wife sat at her machine and looked past her husband as if she were trying to focus on a point just short of infinity.

“You think I don't feel it, too, Ursula? You think you're the only one who feels it?”

But inside he was afraid. How could the news of Amyas so change the shape and color of his wife's face?

“Why don't you go upstairs and lie down? I'll take care of the shop.”

She went without a word. By the machine lay the little date book where he noted the work to be done; Morgon picked it up. At ten o'clock the Fitz girls were coming to pick up the skirts they had left to be shortened and that Miss Johnson who handled trouble calls for the telephone company wanted three zippers repaired in the dresses she'd brought in last week.

At eight o'clock, Morgon stood in the back room and surveyed the pile. Dresses. Trousers. Jackets. Skirts. Seams to be let out, hems to be taken up, buttonholes to be moved over; he had counted on Ursula finishing them today. He sat down and picked up the first skirt, which was already pinned, and started slowly around the hem. Yellow flowered cotton. Like stitching bees into a meadow. When Mrs. Shore came at a quarter of nine to call for her coat, he had hardly fenced in half the pasture.

“I don't hear the machine,” said Mrs. Shore as she tried on the coat before the mirror.

“Ah, my wife's not well. I think she's got a little attack of sinus.”

Saying it almost took away the dull fear in his stomach. Nobody he knew had ever stayed in bed with a sinus infection for more than a few days. After Mrs. Shore left, he hurried back to finish the skirt. But every time he looked at the pile to be done, a panic came over him. He locked the front door, hung out his sign:
closed,
and worked all morning in silence. At noon his eyes ached and he went upstairs to find his wife.

He found her in bed. Her face over the top of the bedclothes looked pinched and craven. The old fairy tale: the wolf grinning in grandmother's nightgown. Morgon stood at the foot of the bed and stared at her helplessly.

“You should drink something. Shall I make you some tea?”

Silence.

“What can I do for you? Does anything hurt?”

“Here.”

She pointed to her heart.

All afternoon they sat in the waiting room of the emergency clinic, among crying children and a few old women bent nearly double with age. When the receptionist finally called
Mrs. Axel,
she rose from her chair and trudged into the doctor's office without looking back. It hurt Morgon that she had nothing to say to him.

Morgon waited. He picked up the
Reader's Digest.
The elevator to the right of him opened and closed; flocks of young doctors hurried in and out, white-coated like geese. Presently he heard his name. Everyone in the room watched him go.

The doctor's office with its certificates and abstract paintings and cabinets of instruments made Morgon feel shoddy and stupid. The doctor was younger and taller than Morgon. Wearing his white coat and the casual emblems of his profession, the stethoscope and head mirror, he introduced himself and peered over his glasses at the tailor.

“You're Mr. Axel? Please sit down.”

Morgon pulled up a chair and faced the doctor at his desk like a student waiting for a reprimand.

“I'm sending your wife to St. Joseph's for a rest. You are familiar with St. Joseph's, I presume?”

“I thought,” stammered the tailor, “that St. Joseph's was for people who—”

He stopped. Waited. He didn't want to give the wrong answer.

“Your wife hasn't had a heart attack, as you both feared. Rather, it's a case of severe depression. A mild nervous breakdown, you could call it. I think that with a month of rest she'll be able to come home.”

What did the tailor do on his first night alone?

He rambled aimlessly from one room to the next, feeling as if a burden had been lifted from him:
the moment before you savor your freedom.
He fed the dog, washed a few dirty dishes, and put them away. He had no desire to cook anything for himself and decided to eat at a Hungarian restaurant on the other side of town which had always intrigued him. Mr. Harris told him that a family ran the restaurant in an old house and he praised it for “local color.”

When he entered the front hall of Czerny's and hung his jacket on the rack, he felt as if he were coming to visit an old friend. The first room he saw contained nothing but a pool table where several young men in leather shorts were shooting a game. Morgon passed quickly into the spacious dining room; it was completely deserted though each table was elaborately set, as if for a banquet of ghosts. Fifty napkins, folded like mitres, perched between the knives and forks and water glasses; a nesting ground of strange birds.

The tailor found a seat in the corner. To his distress he found that he could look right into the kitchen, where three women were eating at a little table. It would be awkward to move now, he decided. After all, they were paying no attention to him. A baby crawled over to the largest woman, dragging a long rope behind it, which seemed to be tied to one of the table legs.

But an old man in a white apron was standing in front of him, his pencil poised on his pad.

“Will you have wine?”

Morgon nodded and looked around for the wine list; there was none.

“For dinner we're having skewered meat and noodles stuffed with red cabbage.”