4

The Tailor Who Told the Truth

In Germantown, New York, on Cherry Street, there lived a tailor named Morgon Axel who, out of long habit, could not tell the truth. As a child he told small lies to put a bright surface on a drab life; as a young man he told bigger lies to get what he wanted. He got what he wanted and went on lying until now when he talked about himself, he did not know the truth from what he wanted the truth to be. The stories he told were often more plausible to him than his own life.

What was the first lie?

That his father was rich. The richest man in Germany.

Told to whom?

Ingeborg Schonberg, the parson’s daughter he loved in Potsdam, where he grew up. Yes, a lie, because his father was not rich. Karl Axel owned a secondhand shop in one of the shabbier quarters of the city. The family lived behind the shop: Hans the oldest brother and after him Heinrich, who were tall and blond and loved practical jokes and wanted to go to sea. Johanna Axel, née Schweber, daughter of the widow Schweber, who cooked for a doctor and his family in Potsdam. Johanna Schweber made good money till she married Karl. Morgon Axel, born in 1896, when Hans was seven and Heinrich was six. Yes, that’s the one: Morgon, who from the beginning was dark-haired and short like his father. He was five years old when he told his first lie. No, not his first lie. Let us call five the age of discretion here: therefore, the first lie on record. Told to the parson’s daughter, age five and a half. The second lie does not concern us. Because then we would have to deal with the third and fourth also.

Look at him now, seven going on eight, a pack of lies behind him, reading at a cherrywood table in his father’s shop, among busts of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Frederick the Great, who lour at him like schoolmasters. Morgon has made himself a little place for his books behind a barrier of cut-glass bowls, stags’ heads, stuffed owls, and nutcrackers carved like the heads of dogs. And don’t forget the cuckoo clocks and the shields and visors and guns of the hunters who have gone down at last with the stags and the owls they killed. Morgon has befriended the guns and named them: Ernst, Dieter, Barbarossa.

Sometimes Saturday and always Sunday (on Sunday Johanna Axel is singing in church), Karl takes his three sons hunting in the forest beyond the city. In the forest live woodcocks, partridges, wild boars, and deer with antlers that branch out like coral. Morgon’s brothers knock partridges out of the air as easily as winking. His father shoots hares and saves the paws for luck. He has hundreds of paws stacked away in a cupboard. Morgon hits nothing, but that’s because he’s so new at it. In his sleep he dreams of shooting so straight and so far that he knocks the sun out of the sky.

Is there anything more monotonous than shooting partridges and hares every Sunday of your life? It is the fourth Sunday of his tenth year, and he’s been hunting with his father ever since he told his first lie at the age of five. The creatures they’ve shot, he says to himself, would fill the Nymphenburg Palace. Has Morgon seen the Nymphenburg Palace? Never in his life. But he has read about it. He has tried to read every book in his father’s shop and all the books in his father’s house, though he understands very little of them: The Memoirs of the Margrave of Augsburg, History of the Imperial Army, The Court of Karl-Eugen, Prince of Württemburg. Morgon has told himself that if he can read them all, his brothers will come back.

They come back before he has accomplished this. One clear July afternoon there they are, standing in the middle of Johanna Axel’s kitchen, both of them shining like the family silver. Trim blue jackets buttoned high at the throat, gold epaulettes, gold buttons where eagles sleep, a spiked helmet where an eagle is spreading its wings. The iron cross nestled in ropes of gold braid that glitter like icicles across their chests. Boots so tall their legs look slim and graceful as a girl’s. Johanna Axel nearly goes out of her mind with joy.

“I have a son in the academy at Kiel and another doing us proud in Berlin: I couldn’t possibly ask for more.”

It is Saturday. Have they forgotten?

“Tomorrow we’ll go hunting,” says Hans, slapping Morgon on the back. “It’ll be like old times.”

That afternoon they all go visiting, all except Morgon who stays home to mind the shop. That’s how he happened to be there when the bell tinkled and in hobbled a wild boar which lifted its head over the counter.

Morgon jumped: the cut-glass bowls and nutcrackers jumped with him. The boar’s face slipped away and he saw an old white-bearded Jew in a skullcap and black coat.

“I wonder,” said the Jew, “if you’d be interested in buying a few items I have here.”

Morgon eyed him suspiciously, for hairs stuck out of his nose like tusks. From the box he had set on the floor, the man brought up a clock case, carved to resemble a country church.

“A few repairs, and you can sell it for a fortune. It belonged to the fourth Duke of Württemburg. When the clock strikes, twelve angels rush out to beat the hours. The Crucifixion takes place in the upper window, and the twelve apostles come out of the lower door two by two, bow to the Savior, and return. All the while it plays Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott.”

“But it doesn’t keep time,” said Morgon, staring at the motionless hands.

“No. But if it did, you could sell it for a fortune.”

“Then my father won’t want to buy it. What else have you got?”

The Jew sighed.

“I have here a fine collection of masks, at least two hundred years old. They come from the castle of Grafeneck. The duke’s guests wore them at a masked ball. Here you see the mask that the archbishop was forced to wear in order to have an audience with the duke——”

He pulled out the face of the boar, carved in wood and painted bright blue. Gold rings hung in its ears. The old man laid it on the counter.

“And here’s the mask ordered by Baron Wimpffen. A great joker, I’ve heard.”

A red hyena with pearls in its snout joined the boar.

“And of course, for the Baroness d’Oberkirch, this lovely brown doe wearing a tiny crucifix in a golden crown. The others, well, I’m not sure who wore them——”

He laid them out in a row across the counter for Morgon’s approval. An emerald green dog with roses curled on its cheeks. A black bear wearing a mitre, and an animal that looked rather like a goat, though Morgon couldn’t be sure. Under the jeweled eyes of each face were slits for the wearer to see out.

“Six masks in all, young sir. They’re absolutely priceless.”

Morgon lifted the bear to his face, the Jew lifted the dog, and they looked at each other, then each set his mask aside.

“Well, I don’t know,” said Morgon. “Can you come back Monday? My father does all the buying. I only wait on people.”

The Jew’s expression passed from polite reserve to polite terror.

“Can’t you give me something toward them now? They’re worth at least four hundred marks.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t. You’ll have to come back.”

When Karl Axel returned and saw the masks, he was delighted.

“They’re superb,” he exclaimed. He was in excellent spirits: they had gone to see his brother Ernst who ran a butcher shop and whose wife had given him nothing but daughters. Business would never be better than in the next few days: Rabbi Mendel’s grandmother had gone mad, fled out of her house, and plunged a knife into Ander Krüller’s only son. Yes, that same Krüller who sat on the city council, and all the cousins of Rabbi Mendel and his wife, who numbered in the hundreds, were selling their possessions and fleeing the city.

“If he comes back, we’ll give him two hundred marks. But it’s likely he’s on his way to Berlin by this time.”

Is there anything more monotonous than hunting partridges and hares every Sunday? Is there anything more exciting than an animal who might, at the edge of enchantment, turn itself into a human being? The next morning Heinrich and Hans and Morgon packed up the masks, shouldered air guns, and traveled to the forest beyond the city. Morgon carried the masks on his back. The forester let the brothers take the horses they always rode with their father. When they reached a clearing they dismounted. Morgon threw the masks on the ground.

“The rule is,” said Hans, “that whoever plays an animal will try to avoid the hunter for one hour. If he succeeds, the animal wins. If the hunter shoots him, the animal loses. Who wants to be what?”

“I’ll be the bear,” said Heinrich. He stopped, picked up the bear’s face, and slipped it over his own. Morgon gasped. Before him stood a bear in Prussian uniform, cruelly raised to the tenth power.

“Morgon, your turn.”

“The dog,” said Morgon. He put on the mask. Its features pressed against his face. He felt hot inside and the eye slits did not fit him properly. He could hardly see.

“Go and hide yourself,” said Hans.

“But the animals should be allowed to take their guns,” exclaimed Heinrich. “In case we meet the boars and bears who do not turn into humans.”

Hans played the hunter, and Morgon had never known such excitement. To lie in the bushes and hear his brother stalking him, to hear him cocking his gun, that was much better than watching woodcocks drop out of the sky. Furthermore, in the role of the animal Morgon excelled both his brothers, because he was smaller, and as he was unhampered by a uniform he could move faster.

“The hunter has the worst of it,” said Hans. “He knows it’s just a game and there’s not a chance of hurting anybody when you’re protected by a mask. We ought to play without masks.”

“Without masks?” repeated Morgon.

“Why not? Once you’ve played the animal, you don’t need a mask to turn you into a dog. Then you’re as vulnerable as an animal really is. It makes you play harder.”

That’s how Morgon Axel, at the age of ten, crawled out of a bush in the forest outside Potsdam and lost his right eye to the gun of his brother. The hunting came to an end, the brothers went back to their regiments, and Morgon Axel got fitted with a blue-glass eyeball.

“Don’t be bitter,” his mother told him. “It was a game that turned out badly.”

On his eighteenth birthday, he went to enlist in the Imperial Army, but no lie was big enough to cover the blue-glass eyeball he wore in his head. So he went to Berlin and applied as assistant to Otto Strauss, a tailor who specialized in uniforms, on whose door you could read in bold Gothic script:

O. Strauss, kgl. preuss. Hoflieferant

Inside you could find all those decorations which so warm the heart of your Prussian officers. Drawers of epaulettes, gloves, and buttons for every rank. Yes, and the shelves of spiked helmets embossed with shining eagles, like the blessed instruments of a holy sacrifice. Yes, and the bolts of blue wool and spools of gold braid; tasseled swords and riding whips and slim black boots. On the walls, O. Strauss had kept several large photographs of the Kaiser and his family and many smaller ones of high-ranking officers wearing the uniforms he had made for them. And look, over here’s the most recent one: a fine photograph of General von Kluck’s First Army entering Brussels, with horses and caissons. (Did Otto Strauss know General von Kluck? No.) It was August 1914, and uniforms were greatly in demand. O. Strauss marched up and down the shop and surveyed his prospective assistant.

“What I need,” he said, “is somebody who knows as much about the military as he knows about fitting and altering clothes. Tell me: how many centimeters should you leave between the cuff buttons on the uniform of a captain in the reserves?”

“Herr Strauss, you insult me,” exclaimed Morgon Axel, waving his hand grandly. “I come from a long line of tailors. My ancestors were the royal tailors to Frederick the Great. A dressmaker on my mother’s side designed the wedding gown of Wilhelmina von Grävenitz.”

O. Strauss leaned against his counter and stared, but Morgon Axel continued unabashed.

“And as for the military! I have two brothers. The oldest is a lieutenant in the Imperial Navy. The other is the captain of the division of the Prussian Guard recently cited by General Ludendorff. I am related by marriage to Colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck and my oldest brother has the ear of Admiral von Holtzendorf.”

O. Strauss touched his ear nervously.

“My father won the Pour le mérite in the last war.” And as he spoke, Morgon saw his father dashing through Ypres on a black horse, shouting to the soldiers lounging in the courtyard: Attack! We are being attacked from the west!

“Why, may I ask——”

“I had the misfortune to lose my right eye in a hunting accident. But my left one is as sound as yours.”

“Well, well,” murmured O. Strauss. “I’ll be glad to try you out. We have all sorts of men coming in here. You’ll find most of them are hard to please.”

From that lie forward, Morgon Axel acted as O. Strauss’s assistant. By day he helped him lay the patterns for cloaks and jackets on long fields of blue wool, and he pinned sleeves and collars on the stocky bodies of officers who made appointments to be fitted. After work he hurried to his room high up in Frau Nolke’s house at the other end of town, lugging the shop’s manuals on the regulations for military dress which he read far into the night. When he had memorized the fundamentals, he began borrowing uniforms, every night a different rank, so that he could examine how they were made.

In the house next door, the West Bavarian Singing Society met twice a week, and on those evenings Morgon Axel could not study. Rich joyful voices flooded his silence, and he opened his window to hear them.

Über’s Jahr, über’s Jahr, wenn me Traübele schneid’t,

Stell’ i hier mi wied’ rum ein;

Bin i dann, bin i dann dein schätzele noch,

So soll die Hochzeit sein.

He leaned on the sill and looked out. Across the street on the sixth floor of a tottering building, an aged dancing master was teaching young women in bloomers and tights the intricacies of the pirouette and the entrechat. From his window, Morgon Axel could plainly see into theirs. A war is going on, he thought, and people are still dancing as if Germany meant nothing to them.

Sitting down at his table once more, he tried to consider the width of the collar on Captain Hess’s uniform but found himself staring vacantly at his own face on the mirror of the wardrobe. It was a warm September night. Under the linden trees, the officers were walking, yes, those officers over whose flesh his fingers had walked miles and miles, gathering pleats and folds on the way. He got up and slipped into the uniform of Captain Hess. Slipped into the sleek trousers and longed-for boots. Buttoned the blue jacket across his chest, fastened the belt, and stood barefoot in front of the mirror. And then stepping out of the bar reserved exclusively for commissioned officers, he leaned on the windowsill and looked up at the figure of a single girl dancing by herself. Perhaps she knew that Morgon Axel was watching. What was the good of military regulations, of drills and marches, if it couldn’t protect you against longing to be free? Captain Morgon Axel would send someone to fetch her, but that wasn’t the way. The next night, another would take her place.

One evening Morgon noticed the studio was dark; no one ever danced there again, and shortly afterwards the singers, too, disappeared. For the next three years he lived on Frau Nolke’s turnips and O. Strauss’s chocolates (courtesy of his customers), which the old gentleman hoarded shamefully. A young lieutenant, being fitted for a cloak, told Morgon that he had bought all his Christmas and birthday presents for the next year, though it was only March, so that if he were killed in action, his family and friends would know he hadn’t forgotten them. A captain from Bremen, who lisped in honor of the Kaiser and wore a monocle, ordered six pairs of Hessian boots, because, he explained, a soldier should live at all times in his boots. He was modeling his conduct on Frederick the Great who kept his hat and his boots on even when he was ill, rose at four every morning, and in the evening played the flute for recreation. Both the captain and the lieutenant left their photographs for O. Strauss to hang on his wall and both were killed at Soissons.

But one clear night in November, Kaiser Wilhelm fled into Holland. What was to be done? The Imperial Army marched grimly back to Berlin, passing through the Brandenburger Tor. Wreaths crowned their helmets, and they carried a new banner: “Peace and Freedom.” Morgon Axel wept and applied for passage to America, taking with him one fur-lined cape (Army surplus), one suit (much worn), and seven animal masks which his father had willed him; there was nothing else left, and Morgon Axel was the sole heir.

Now look at him, middle-aged, still short and rather stocky, a square figure, in a tweed hunting jacket with absurd shoulder pads, standing in the doorway of his tailor shop on Cherry Street, Germantown, New York.

Wait. You must give an account of the years in between.

The evidence for those years has been lost, except for some brief scenes, undated, by which we may only surmise that he worked as a tailor in New York City and married Ursula Rincetti, daughter of an Italian cabinetmaker and restorer of styles past.

Now Morgon is sitting in the tiny apartment where he lives with his wife and his son, Amyas, aged twelve. Christened Hans Federico but nicknamed Amyas by a young English girl who worked in the Germantown bank auditing accounts and occasionally babysat with Amyas and held him in her arms and sang him to sleep with an old song:

You and I and Amyas

Amyas and you and I.

To the greenwood must we go, alas!

You and I, my life and Amyas.

It is spring. Or summer. Or any season. What you will. Morgon is sitting in front of the television set, watching the “Ed Sullivan Show.” Morgon Axel has the only color television on the block. He is admiring the red sequined suits of the dancing couple, “who have recently played at the Copacabana.” There is a Copacabana in Los Angeles—but it is another Copacabana which concerns us here, just as it is another Sunset Strip, another Hollywood, another Las Vegas and Broadway that we are speaking of, rather than the ones generally known. Long hours of watching television and films have rebuilt these streets in Morgon Axel’s head like a stage setting, deficient in details but peopled with a cast of thousands. Captain Hess and General Ludendorff and Colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck have given way to Roy Rogers and Gene Autrey and Fred Astaire. Sometimes Morgon watches the talent show on the Albany station, “Stairway to the Stars,” and as the young people sing, tap-dance, and play the piano, it is Amyas he imagines, leaping on a trampoline and being discovered.

For Amyas is talented that way, no doubt about it. He has that grace which Morgon so marveled at when he shouldered the weight of Captain Hess’s uniform one night in Berlin and saw, in the opposite window, a young girl dancing. Once a week Amyas studies gymnastics and trapeze acrobatics with Taft Toshiho in Yonkers, who also teaches judo to secretaries and housewives. Amyas and the six other boys in his class have already performed in high schools and Kiwanis clubs around the state and at the Ulster County Fair. It’s only a matter of months, says Morgon to his friends, till you’ll be seeing Amyas on television. On Broadway.

“Tell me about how it was when you worked in the theater,” says Amyas. He is five years old and his father sits on the edge of his bed, waiting for his son to go to sleep.

“Well,” says Morgon Axel, “the shows are not worth mentioning compared to the fêtes. Before the war, such fêtes! I remember one fête I designed for the Count of Ansbach-Schwedt.”

And as he speaks, he sees himself very clearly standing on a balcony in the castle of the count, surveying the garden and the woods beyond, brilliant with thousands of lanterns.

“All the guests came in hunting costumes. I designed over a hundred masks like the faces of animals, no two exactly alike. The women put on the masks and the men had to hunt for their partners in the forest.”

The next morning there is no forest, only the shop, which is small and untidy. The front room contains two mirrors, a few chairs, bolts of wool and gabardine, catalogs and swatches spread open on a table, and a rack of finished garments which barely hides a dressmaker’s dummy. In the window Morgon drapes remnants of silk over a truncated plaster column. On the walls hang his masks and his guns. That’s the front room, where the tailor receives his customers.

But there’s another room behind it, separated from the first by a red curtain. Sybil, the tailor’s golden retriever, lopes back and forth between them like a messenger. Customers waiting for their packages can hear the tailor’s wife stitching and sighing behind the curtain. Also, the clicking of Sybil’s toenails against the bare floor; they have grown long from lack of exercise, for though the tailor dreams of hunting and has his dog and his guns all ready, he seldom finds the time.

Why do you say nothing of Ursula, the tailor’s wife?

Searching the tailor’s memory, we find that up till now she passed through it as through water, leaving no footprints. A dead civilization which shapes what we are though we will never know what it is.

Nevertheless, give us a picture of the tailor’s wife.

Why, when the customers slipped through the curtains for their fittings—the tailor had built a tiny dressing room here—they saw sitting under the naked bulb that dangled from the ceiling a slender woman with dark hair clouded around her face as if she wanted to hide herself. She was always bending over a piece of work and treading the sewing machine with her heel. In front of her on the pegboard wall, which was no more than a foot from her nose, hung spools of thread in every size and color, and this was her horizon from eight in the morning till six at night.

Behind her the table was heaped with dresses to be mended, zippers to be put in, skirts to be hemmed, trousers with ill-fitting cuffs, and suits cut and basted, which had to be finished. The tailor’s wife never looked back for fear she couldn’t go on. She had told this to the priest one Sunday when she went to confession, for she was a devout Catholic, though her husband, raised Lutheran, attended no church now.

“Sometimes I think I’ll die of despair, Father. I look back and see that the pile never runs out, for just when I think I’m near the end, Morgon heaps on more work. What’s the use, I say to myself, of working my way through a pile that’s got no bottom? And then my fingers just stop, Father, they won’t turn the wheel one more time.”

“Then you mustn’t look back, my daughter,” whispers the voice behind the grille. “Reach behind you and pick up one piece at a time. One at a time. Then you’ll be able to get through the day. Not to finish the pile; that’s not a thing any of us could do in a lifetime. But to get yourself safely across to the next day. God Himself doesn’t ask more of you.”

“If only He’d give me a vision to help me through the bad times, Father. Just a small one, so I don’t forget what’s under the pile.” An angel dancing on the point of her needle. A wheel within the wheel of her machine.

Having no visions, she settled her love on her son. If he was not an angel, he at least came close to flying like one. When she sewed costumes for Amyas and the six boys in his troupe, the needle leaped for joy like a dolphin in the sea of nylon and satin, and the stitches unwound themselves in love. And all the while Morgon Axel walked up and down in the front room and graciously accepted an order for yellow jodhpurs from William Harris, the fiery-haired riding master of High Stepping Stables outside of town.

“Can I make jodhpurs? My dear Mr. Harris, I can make anything. You should have seen the silver jodhpurs I made for Gene Autrey when I worked in the city. Why, I could make jodhpurs to fit a spider! I remember the first riding outfit I ever made—it was for the Duke of Augsburg who was giving a ball at his castle in Westphalia.” (A self-indulgent laugh.) “All the guests came in hunting costume. Well, I made the Duke a splendid habit in russet velvet, and when it was done, what do you think? I’d cut the trousers with the nap going up one leg and down the other and when the light struck him he seemed to divide himself like a pair of scissors. But he was very kind about it. ‘I’ve invited so many beautiful women,’ he said, ‘that no one will notice.’”

Mr. Harris pulled off his gloves, a finger at a time, hung his camel’s hair overcoat on the rack, and stood stiffly in the middle of the room while the tailor crawled around him on the floor, puffing a little as he took the measurements of the riding master’s trim figure.

“Ah, the life I’ve seen,” sighed Morgon Axel, pulling pins out of the cushion that dangled next to his heart. “When I worked in the city, I had my own place right over the Stork Club. Kitchen, bathroom, shower. I had the whole floor to myself, just for work space. Did I ever tell you about the time I had dinner with Jimmy Durante and an English housewife who was flown over because she’d won something in a soap contest? The company gave me a Lincoln—turn, Mr. Harris.”

Mr. Harris turns and looks straight ahead at the curtain. Behind the tailor’s story, he hears the chugging accompaniment of a sewing machine.

“You ought to give your wife a vacation,” he says suddenly. “Every time I come in here——”

The tailor hears and does not hear.

“A Lincoln, Mr. Harris. It had a built-in bar where most cars have the back seat. But I’m glad to leave it all behind. Here in the country, I’m happy. I go hunting when I want to, I take off a week here and there when the weather’s nice. I’m nobody’s slave.”

A sigh floats out from behind the curtain, as from a dark well. The tailor has unwittingly spoken the truth.

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.”

It was an announcement rather than a menu, for the old man whisked out of sight and reappeared a moment later with a bottle of wine: Schwartze Katz. Morgon felt he ought to say something.

“Is it good?”

“Everyone likes it,” said the old man, shrugging as he yanked out the cork and poured the tailor a glass.

In the tiny kitchen, the youngest of the three women got up and hurried to the stove. His order had set them all in motion. He avoided glancing at them, but he could hear them chattering in their own tongue as they stirred and scraped and shifted the dishes about. They had interrupted their dinner to serve his.

The tailor ate slowly, aware that at last the women had sat down again and were eating exactly what he was eating, only without the amenities of clean linen and good service. Suddenly he imagined that they saw him as an eccentric, a crank, and he longed to go and sit down with them. The light outside was falling away; the woman with the child rose from the table and stood at the window, and suddenly everything flared up gold under the last look of the sun. Then the darkness dropped; the old man turned on the lights in the dining room, and the oldest woman began scrubbing a large kettle at the sink.

When did the tailor first miss his wife?

Not until he saw a strange woman washing dishes in a strange kitchen. So it had always been, so it would always be. The man out in front, the woman in the kitchen with the child—ah, that was where the real life started. Amyas, ten years old, sits on a stool in the kitchen and talks to his mother, who is shelling peas, nodding, and listening; the window open, the warm spring air blowing through.

Morgon paid his bill and left. He did not want to go home. He walked over to Main Street and peered in the windows of the shops. It was Saturday night, it was summer, and the young people parading up and down the street gave it the air of a carnival. Standing in front of Pearlmutter’s pawnshop, Morgon examined, with great interest, guns, suitcases, rings, boots, electric fans, cameras, and hair dryers. By the time his bus arrived, he felt sated. Pressing his face to the window he tried in vain to separate his own image from the passing world outside. He got off the bus and felt the first drops of a warm rain and hurried toward his building. As he passed the butcher’s door he saw a little boy, barefoot, hugging himself on the stoop, smiling at him. The tailor hardly realized what he had seen until he was inside his own door and it was too late to smile back.

What were the tailor’s thoughts as he lay in bed?

The room is still and nothing is lonelier than the dark.

What did the tailor see when he entered his shop on Monday?

A pile of unfinished garments in the back room. How was he going to finish everything? No kindly priest had told him the trick of reaching behind and taking one at a time, the trick of not looking back. Furthermore, he couldn’t very well sit and sew while customers were knocking at the door, demanding to be fitted or to pick up their packages, or simply wanting to pass the time of day. The front room faced the world, resounded with courtesy and opinion; light flooded it from the outside and everything appeared to be under control. But now the tailor found that all this depended on the state of things in the back room, where a deep paralysis had set in. Overcome with anxiety, he closed shop on Thursday and Friday to catch up on back work. He sat in his wife’s chair and lost himself in the tedious tasks that banded her life like a ring.

And what did the tailor say on Sunday when he visited his wife?

He stood at the foot of her bed, clutching his hat, staring at this woman who was almost a stranger to him. Her hospital gown gave her an antiseptic air. She seemed to have lost so much of her coarse dark hair that Morgon could almost see the outline of her skull. For the first time, he heard himself lie.

“You look pretty good, Ursula.”

Silence. She gazed at him curiously, as if she had forgotten his name. To Morgon’s relief, the patients whose medicine bottles cluttered the other three night stands were gone.

“Are you comfortable here?” he asked.

“It’s all right.”

“You got nice neighbors?” He jerked his head toward the next bed.

“Margery Wilkes and Norma Tiedelbaum are nice. They’re downstairs with their visitors. But Mrs. Shingleton—agh, she’s disgusting. Saves all her toilet paper, keeps it in her pillowcase. She’s supposed to move up to the sixth floor next week.”

“Terrible,” said Morgon. Then, hesitantly. “Have you seen the doctor? Has he told you when you’ll be ready to come home?”

“I will come home,” said Ursula slowly and distinctly, “when I can find someone to take my place here.”

“What!” exclaimed Morgon. “Why, there are plenty of people waiting for hospital beds.”

“Yes. But nobody willing to take my place.”

The tailor felt a little frightened, for it dawned on him that his wife was really losing her mind.

“Do you mean to say that when you’re well, you can’t leave the hospital? Did the doctor tell you that?”

“No,” said Ursula. She closed her eyes. “Amyas told me.”

“Amyas!” cried the tailor.

“Every night he comes and stands at the foot of the bed. ‘Amyas,’ I say, ‘when will you come home?’ I plead with him, Morgon. I plead with him. ‘It would take a thousand years of weeping,’ he says, ‘to pay a fraction of the grief I’ve had to bear since my father turned me out.’”

“That’s not true!” shouted the tailor. “I never turned him out. He left of his own free will.”

Ursula opened her eyes, as empty of feeling as those of fish.

What was the vision of Amyas’s mother?

Amyas, dressed in a doublet of green taffeta cut like oak leaves, on a cloth of gold. He hangs like a lantern on the trees outside, his white face shining through the window.

A full moon tonight, says Margery Wilkes in the next bed.

Amyas, whispers his mother, when are you coming home?

What was the vision of Amyas’s father?

Gabardine in a heap; bills to be paid; a dress form with a hole in its belly and no head or arms or legs; the orders streaming in; his wife’s face. Himself dancing on a treadmill, fed by days pointed like spikes. Without undressing he lies down on his bed, closes his eyes, and sees, brilliant and strange, the mask of sickness that has come over his wife’s face.

“The animal always tries to avoid the hunter. If the hunter shoots you, you lose. If you avoid him, you win.”

Ursula shakes her head but already Morgon is counting for her to hide.

“Eight! nine! ten!”

Shouldering his gun, he sets out. Trim blue jacket buttoned high at the throat, gold epaulettes, gold buttons where eagles sleep, the iron cross nestled in ropes of gold braid. Every bush shelters a victim. Far ahead of him, Amyas is running for his life, and Ursula hobbles through the underbrush after him, dragging a trap on her foot.

“Ursula, wait! The game is over!”

But the gun springs back into his hand. He pulls off the epaulettes and the iron cross, he throws his jacket to the ground. His wife does not stop running; she knows he is the hunter who will never take her alive till he runs beside her as a creature of prey.

Darkness is rolling in; at the end of Market Street you may see Pearlmutter’s pawnshop. Inside, Solomon Pearlmutter in pinstriped pants and a Hawaiian shirt, is standing at the till, counting his coins into a deerskin pouch.

Suddenly the shop bell tinkles and in limps a stocky man carrying a huge knapsack on his shoulder and a rifle in his hand. Solomon touches the pistol he keeps under the counter.

“I have here a number of things I’d like to get rid of,” says the man.

And he begins to empty the bag on the counter with ritual precision. Masks carved like fabulous animals, photographs of acrobats, broken trophies, a box of military decorations. Solomon keeps his left hand on the pistol and shakes his head.

“If I can’t sell ’em, I don’t want ’em. You see the kind of things I got here. Watches, rings, guns.”

His right hand waves toward a wall studded with electric guitars. Everything in Solomon’s shop knows its place; the guitars stay on the wall, the pocket watches and diamond rings lie in a glass case by the cash register, the accordions huddle together in the front row, the guns hang high over the desk at the back of the store where he figures his earnings at night.

“You won’t take any of them?”

The wild look that comes over the man’s face makes Solomon uneasy.

“No. Sorry.”

“What will you give me for this rifle?”

“Let’s have a look,” says Solomon and reaches for it.

Quick as a snake the tailor takes aim, but he does not shoot.

Long afterward, when the tailor’s body had crumpled across his mind a thousand times, Solomon Pearlmutter wondered why his attacker had not taken the first shot.

When Morgon Axel awoke, he was lying in a strange bed. He tried to prop himself up on his elbows and felt as if a knife had cut and salted a deep crevice between his shoulders. Letting his head sink back to the pillow, he turned it slowly to the right and the left. An endless row of beds echoed each other in both directions, yes, and across the aisle as well, though someone had dimmed the light in this room and drawn the window shades. The only light that let him see all this came from the hall.

Those who cannot walk must fly. So Morgon Axel raised himself up until he saw his own body tucked under a blanket on the bed beneath him. But the real Morgon Axel was floating horizontally out of the ward and down the corridor, like a dandelion seed. Past closed doors, Past a green oxygen tank next to one of them. Past the vases of flowers which the nurses set outside the rooms every night.

Far ahead of him, he heard voices. A buzz, a confusion as of owls’ wings, crickets’ cries, pigs rooting for truffles in the woods, squirrels rolling acorns in attics. A murmur and cry of doves. Hovering six feet above the floor, Morgon grabbed the door—Doctor’s Lounge, said the letters under his hand—and pushed himself through.

A forest was growing in the doctor’s lounge. Yes, and there was a judge’s bench where an old Jew sat, pounding a gavel and calling the quails to order, and a skeleton stood at one end of the bench and at the other end Amyas Axel, in green doublet and white stockings, was walking on his hands back and forth under the nose of the owlish clerk, who perched on the Jew’s shoulder and saw everything. The woods were packed with spectators, rabbits and bears and deer, who lifted their heads behind the witnesses in the front row, blond Ingeborg the parson’s daughter and Hans who died years ago and Heinrich who died with him; only their spiked helmets survived. And here’s Otto Strauss, and next to him Frau Nolke, peeling a lapful of turnips.

When the last leaf stopped rustling, the Jew began to speak. At his first words, Morgon sank to the ground like a dead balloon.

Members of the jury, we are entering upon the last stages of this trial. You know that we have been trying to administer justice in accord with the law. What is the administration of justice but this, that a guilty man be found guilty and an innocent man be acquitted?

Let me remind you, members of the jury, that your role is very different from mine. I sit here to see that this trial is conducted in accord with the law and to clarify to you what the law is. You have heard half a century of evidence and it is the task of each of you to decide whether the facts presented to you support the charge against this man: the failure to love. The punishment, if he is convicted, is death by loneliness.

And now let me deal briefly with the evidence of the case. You have heard the testimony of the prosecution—

(The skeleton bows; like a cardsharp, a bookie, a flimflam man, his skull is always smiling.)

—who has argued that Morgon Axel never knew what he saw and never touched what he knew but hid it in lies and loved his lies more than the naked face of truth. The face of truth is neither steady nor kind. That is why we cannot subpoena the key witness at this trial: we should have to summon everybody on earth.

(Amyas, in hobo clothes, is walking on a single strand of hair that extends over the judge’s head. From an inside pocket he pulls a pair of white doves and sends them circling over the courtroom.)

The case rests on the testimony of Solomon Pearlmutter—

(Solomon Pearlmutter, subpoenaed during sleep, stands up in the front row and bows. When his wife wakes him tomorrow, he will tell her he dreamed an extraordinary dream. She will ask him what it was, but he won’t remember; already herds of rabbits and quails are arming on the borders of his sleep, ready to drive his broken dream into the pit.)

—who concedes that before he shot the accused, there was enough time for the accused to take aim and fire. What you must decide, creatures of the jury, is whether Morgon Axel did indeed wish to shoot Solomon Pearlmutter or whether the accused wished Solomon Pearlmutter to shoot him, so that he might take his wife’s place and put on the terrible eyesight of truth.

You have heard the defense, Amyas Axel, plead most eloquently on behalf of his father. Over the objections of the prosecution, I am admitting into this court a kind of testimony never before, I think, admitted into any court.

(Amyas, balancing on the strand of hair, takes an invisible loaf of bread from an invisible oven and slices it into baskets.

The birds take the baskets in their beaks and fly down with them to the jury and to the spectators.

Morgon Axel reaches for an imaginary slice and pulls out a real one.)

Creatures of the jury, I have nothing more to say to you. I ask you to go out and consider your verdict and tell me whether you see before you (a rustle of leaves and collars; a thousand heads turn to look at Morgon Axel leaning against the door to the forest) a man who is guilty of loving nothing but his own lies or whether you see a man who has tried to patch himself together a good life out of a bad one, and who is capable not only of love but of change. Of giving himself up to put on another man’s truth.

Morgon Axel sits up in bed. A young nurse is speaking to him, smiling pleasantly.

“You may go this morning, Mr. Axel. The X-rays of your shoulder show that the wound is superficial. If you take the elevator at the end of the hall down to the ground floor, you’ll find yourself directly across from the front entrance. There’s a taxi stand outside.”

Morgon Axel climbs unsteadily out of bed. Someone has laid his clothes on a chair. He dresses and rides downstairs in a crowd of doctors and wheelchairs, and chooses a taxi. A nice green checkered one. When he leaves the cab, he hands the driver all the change in his pockets, which isn’t a great deal. He travels lightly, this Morgon Axel, without any baggage to hold him down. The sky is clear, the air as sweet as forgiveness. He unlocks his shop, and bending over, he props the door open with an empty spool. The room smells stale and musty. Morgon Axel pulls a chair outside, sits down in the sunlight that dapples the front of his shop, closes his eyes, and waits for his wife to come home.