In the countryside surrounding the Manikin, wind rules a winter’s day. Whether or not it is frigid or snowing, bleak or brilliantly clear, wind gives the day its personality. When a gusting wind whips the chill into a froth, wild animals and sensible people will go hungry rather than go outside. Blustering cold is the worst kind, and though a strong wind animates a forest, cracking frozen branches from trunks and filling the air with swirling snow, it is an illusory life. If such a wind suddenly ceased, the forest would become as eerily still as a photograph of itself.
Compare that stillness to a day with only the softest of breezes—at first the snowy scene is quiet, but it takes only a few seconds before a blue jay screams and a cardinal pipes sweetly in reply. A sandbag’s worth of snow falls from the top of a pinetree. The delicately placed pawprints of a fox lead across the path and over the raised bank. Here and there little pockets in the snow are filled with deer droppings, and the crisscrossed marks of bounding rabbits show how busy life has been.
Life spreads out across the Craxton estate when the wind is down. Steady cold can be held at bay with a well-made woolen coat. There’s Lore trekking across Firethorn’s lower slope in search of a fat old buck. Behind the garage Junket splits logs, not because they need more wood—the shed is stocked to the roof—but because driving a blade through a resisting log temporarily knocks out his confusing emotions. Boggio watches him in the distance from his small window. He’s got nothing better to do now that he’s finished his owl, except to rearrange the feathers to make sure they are evenly fluffed.
Inside the Manikin’s kitchen, Ellen fills a bucket from the stove’s hot-water reservoir, Eva puts a wet sheet through the wringer, and Sylva leaves her dough half kneaded and rushes off to the toilet.
In the living room, Peg lifts Mrs. Craxton by the shoulders, transferring her awkwardly from her wheelchair onto the sofa. The Craxtons’ lawyer is coming all the way from Rochester to attend to legal matters that “cannot wait until spring,” Mrs. Craxton had insisted. In front of her, the animals stand in various poses on crowded platforms—but she’s unimpressed by them, unmoved by their discomforting gaze.
Upstairs, Billie dozes in the armchair in Lilian’s room, where she’s been dusting.
In the barn, Peter sweeps the aisle. A black cat, missing one ear, hops from a stall door onto the back of an indifferent cow and twists around in three full circles before settling.
Sid rests against his snow shovel on the path leading from the Manikin to the barn and other outbuildings. He talks to Nora, who is distributing a bag of oatmeal cookies among the men.
In the woods, within calling distance though not within sight, Sylva’s two boys eat pancakes of snow sweetened with maple syrup.
A quarter mile away, in Boggio’s hut, Lilian Stone lies beneath the man who calls himself her lover. Because of the cold, they have taken off no more than necessary. Lilian can’t keep her thoughts from wandering. For no apparent reason, she recalls her performance at a recital when she was ten. It had been a struggle—the black-and-white pattern of the keyboard filled her mind so completely that for a terrifying minute she couldn’t remember where to begin, and then she’d let her hands go where they would and watched in wonder as they danced from beginning to end of the little Chopin piece.
Back in the kitchen, Ellen shakes a rattle above Sylva’s baby.
Outside, Machine barks when a chip of wood flies from Junket’s ax. In the barn, the black cat twitches her one ear but does not raise her head. Peter mucks out the empty stall of the Craxtons’ horse, a tranquil, fifteen-year-old stock horse named Emily.
On the path, Sid tries to kiss “that mousy mulatta,” as he calls Nora behind her back, but she slips past him.
Mrs. Craxton says to Peg, “I won’t survive the winter. I can feel it in my bones.”
In the old smokehouse, Boggio admires the exquisite workmanship of his bird, far superior to the scrawny snowy owl on display at the American Museum. So what if that one was shot and mounted by Theodore Roosevelt himself?
In Boggio’s hut on the edge of the marsh, Lilian thinks, Stupid pig, and giggles to herself. The man lies on top of her, too exhausted now even to raise his head.
In the Manikin’s bathroom off the kitchen, Sylva dries her lips with a handkerchief. It’s been the same each time—queasy all day, sick to her stomach once or twice in the afternoon, and then she’s ravenous. When she steps into the kitchen, Ellen asks her if she’s feeling all right.
“Fine as ever,” Sylva says. “Better than fine,” with a smile so peculiarly modest that Ellen understands Sylva’s meaning immediately. As she kisses Sylva on the cheek, the baby shakes the rattle with furious hilarity.
The afternoon sun is not as blindingly brilliant as it could be—wispy mare’s tails dull the light, and the shrubbery around the Manikin, thick-ribbed with snow, glistens only in patches. The old gatehouse at the end of the drive, where Lore and Junket live, looks as though it is made of slabs of gingerbread with a vanilla cream roof. The gate has been left open, and snow has collected on the flat, horizontal bars of the lattice. Deep hoof marks and ruts show that Emily and the sleigh passed along the drive after the last snowfall, which ended early this morning.
Red Vic left right after breakfast to meet Mr. Edward Watts, Esquire, who offered to drive with his assistant in his own motor as far as Millworth. How picturesque the scene will look to Mr. Watts’s myopic urban eyes as he passes through the gate in the Craxtons’ sleigh. For the first five hundred yards the drive is bordered on either side by elms, and beyond, the front yard slopes up to the house in gentle mounds. The crisp air smells of wood fires. The Manikin waits sleepily for visitors. Despite the renovations, the manor has an aura of quaint shabbiness. Like the nobly born Seneca who holds the reins, the Craxton estate deserves a more deferential century.
* * *
White spruce kindling for their fire. Red pine needles for their bed. Even in midsummer the nights were chilly and they had no blankets, only the clothes on their backs. They would embrace for warmth as much as for love, and they’d sleep with their legs braided together, but still they’d wake up shivering. “Hop to, hop to,” she’d say to him, pulling him to his feet, and as quickly as possible they’d stir the fire to uncover the warm embers, add tinder, and puff and puff until the flames rose.
Every morning they’d follow the creek upstream for a half mile to the waterfall. By July the cascade over the far edge of the grotto had dried to a trickle, a faucet’s worth of water that made the moss shimmer, but the pool was still deep enough to cover their heads when they stood on the bottom. In one of the curved granite walls, about ten feet above the pool, a rectangular opening had been carved, probably by Indians, though for what original purpose they could never figure out, since the hole was too high up the sheer wall to explore. Birds used it now—bitterns that darted in and out like flies.
They ate wild plums and blackberries and whatever fish they could catch with their hands. Once when she was hungry she said, “I’ll eat you!” and sank her teeth into his arm. She’d only meant to play, but she managed to break the skin and draw a bit of blood. He had great fun teasing her for it.
They both knew they’d have to move on when the weather turned. For weeks on end they’d take off their clothes in the morning and put them on at night—in the warm, mottled sunlight, they went naked. They vowed to stone to death anyone unlucky enough to wander into their paradise.
Tucked between two boulders at one edge of the pool was a sandy strip about three feet wide and six feet long. After they bathed they’d fall onto the sand and they’d kiss and dandle. When he grew hard he’d find his way into her body. Years later, he can recall the sensation of water dripping from her hair onto his chest. And the smell of tannin everywhere. He remembers the sharpness of her ribs and the salty taste of her nipples. He remembers the tiny cracks in her lips. He remembers thinking, This isn’t happening. He remembers her vividly. The dream of her. Sap beneath their fingernails. The shock of cold as they plunged together into the pool. The shadowy water.
Such places exist, even though they seem to belong more to the imagination than to the world. The grotto and waterfall are hidden at the bottom of Firethorn Mountain’s western slope, just beyond the boundary of the Craxton estate. The place is real, and everything else is possible. Junket probably will grow old; he will always remember loving Peg Griswood, though never making love. They’d swum in the grotto—the Devil’s Cauldron, as Lore had named it. As children, they’d swum naked on dusty summer afternoons and stained their lips with the juice of wild berries. The little beach would have made a perfect bed, though it serves this purpose only in Junket’s fantasy, which he tries to disguise as memory.
Junket thinks he loves Peg a little less each day. But then at night, his mind turns toward the future that has always included Peg. Sometimes he wonders whether it is even love he feels or the passion born from intense friendship. For three quarters of his life they have been like brother and sister, at ease with each other and fiercely loyal. But neither can pretend to continue this affection anymore—Junket hardly blames Peg for wanting better. He’s just a scrubby, raffish yokel who can’t add fractions. He understands that time usually dulls even the most mystical pain, and he can comfort himself during the day by ignoring Peg, but when he lies in the darkness, his love threatens to drive him mad if it is not satisfied. A mad old hermit with his beard tangled in his toes—this will be Junket. No, he will be nothing without Peg. It’s as though he’s been following her farther and farther into a forest, and now she has disappeared, leaving him to fend for himself. She has judged him capable, self-sufficient. Not at all. He’s inept on his own. The idea of solitude fills him more with terror than with pride these days. So he indulges the desire that he should be forbidding himself, tries to twist it into hindsight. He will love Peg in a future memory. He will remember loving her.
So far the winter has been like any other, perhaps harsher than most, which suits Junket just fine. He dreads spring and its erratic thaws and rain and waxy green shoots that smell like rotting meat. And summer. How can he bear to live through a whole summer?
During the day he splits logs and transports wood from the shed to the house, he carries buckets full of kitchen slops, he helps his father skin and gut his game, all the while remaining within view of the Manikin, just in case Peg is watching from her third-floor window. He wants her to see that he isn’t thinking about her. But night after night he thinks about her plenty, succeeds in calming himself only after he has indulged the fantasy of loving Peg. He should be loving her less. He’d wanted to leave the Manikin in order to forget her. Now he doesn’t want to leave at all, since as long as he is near Peg Griswood he can pretend to ignore her.
Rarely do children of Junket’s age commit themselves to failed love with such relentlessness—ordinarily, adolescence diverts emotions, mending through sheer distraction. But Junket loves with the fervor of a much younger child, convinced that this love is necessary, that Peg had incited him to depend upon her and then abandoned him. He falls more deeply into love, into an unreal future, and denies himself the chance of any future at all.
If he can’t have Peg he wants to remain at the edge of childhood, no older, no more separate from Peg than he already is, and then to swoop forward to some distant point beyond life. He wants to linger and then leave the world. In this sense he is vastly different from his father, who refuses to let even the most monstrous changes overwhelm him. Lore is a great believer in stasis and accepts change by convincing himself that he must conform to the patterns of nature. He is the kind of man who, in the face of devastating loss, will quietly and efficiently rebuild his life.
Junket doesn’t have enough of a life to rebuild. When he lies awake at night thinking of Peg, of his expectations, of the empty future, it feels like slow suicide.
* * *
“I know the reason…”
It is late, and Lore and Ellen have found themselves alone in the kitchen. Mrs. Craxton sat up for almost two hours playing a game of grandfather’s clock patience, making her clock-packets and packing upward with unbearable slowness, as though her own internal clock were ticking at half time. And of course Ellen couldn’t leave until the old woman had fallen asleep. The long meeting with her lawyer must have overtired her, and she’d passed beyond the reasonable fatigue that precedes sleep into irritable wakefulness. After lunch, she’d closed herself in the library with Mr. Watts, and at three o’clock they’d sent for Sid. The gardener Sid, inexplicably! He came out of the library a quarter of an hour later—he said he’d been sworn to secrecy, and if ordinarily secrets weren’t safe with him, on this occasion pride kept him tight-lipped. Mrs. Craxton could have enlisted the help of any employee, but she’d chosen Sid. He had no intention of betraying her. Yet he couldn’t help mumbling as he collapsed into a chair in the kitchen, “Mean old goose!” Then he’d rested his forehead on the table and laughed until he started to choke and Sylva had to slap him between his shoulder blades to help him catch his breath.
They’ve gone off to bed, all but Lore, who arrived late for supper and dallies afterward, smoking, pondering the ceiling. That’s how Ellen finds him when she returns to the kitchen. So his voice startles her when he finally speaks.
“I know the reason now,” he repeats with a wink.
Lore and Ellen share a well-worn familiarity born of similar experience. They’ve lived at the Manikin longer than the rest of the staff, except Sylva and Peter, who were the only employees willing to move with the Craxtons from Rochester. They’ve both been widowed and are raising their children alone. And they do not complain about hard work. But for all the pleasant sympathy they feel toward each other, they have rarely had a private conversation. Ellen manages the interior of the Manikin. Lore tends to the outside. Their different jobs depend upon quite different personalities—Ellen insists upon order, cleanliness, polished surfaces, and rigid routines; Lore can only hope that nature offers him profitable opportunities. So while Ellen always seems to have rehearsed her part, Lore is more of an improviser. If he weren’t such a subdued man, he’d be foolishly impetuous, or so he fears. He has trained himself to observe, to wait for an advantage while keeping his first impressions to himself.
Between Lore’s reticence and Ellen’s poise their encounters have never been more than superficial. There was a time early on when a vague awkwardness between them might have betrayed a depth of feeling, but they were too involved in the many demands and adjustments of their new positions to notice. Since then they have grown used to each other without becoming more intimate.
So Lore’s declaration throws Ellen off guard. I know the reason. He lets the words fly almost aimlessly out of his mouth, and now Ellen must catch them and bring them back.
“The reason?”
“My boy’s in the doldrums, and I’ve finally figured out the reason why.” As though to ensure that Ellen pays attention, he waits for her to push him on. But instead of repeating her question, she tries to diminish the problem. “I hadn’t noticed anything wrong. Junket’s a good boy.”
“He’s not himself.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know the reason why.” He winks again, but Ellen has grown impatient and doesn’t answer. After a long silence Lore explains. “It’s your Peg. She’s the reason. Foolish of me not to have figured it out right away.”
“What has my daughter done?”
“She’s who she is—that’s what. Junk’s been moping over her. Brokenhearted. I didn’t even notice. Lovesick. But she’s much too good for him—I’ve always thought so. She’s beautiful.” Lore squints at Ellen, subjecting her to his amused scrutiny, as though, Ellen thinks, he’d really said, You’re beautiful, and was gauging her reaction. But Ellen believes beauty to be a cosmetic quality—Lilian Stone is beautiful, her face a living portrait, perfectly painted and framed by her silky pageboy hair. Peg is merely pretty. And Ellen herself—she’s about as lovely as … the giant green turtle in the Craxton collection! Her lips twitch toward a smile at the comparison. But why does Lore stare at her that way?
“She’s become quite the sophisticated young lady,” he continues in a tone of voice so soft it is almost sinister. “She won’t give Junk the time of day anymore. Hasn’t been out on a hunt for weeks, though I’ve invited her often enough.”
“Oh, Peg won’t have anything to do with guns.”
“You don’t know your daughter, do you?”
Ellen is adept at containing a swell of rage, but Lore has stumbled upon a charged subject. “That’s none of your business!” she says, pushing out of her chair. She might as well have hurled a brick through the kitchen window. Her defensiveness is so foreign that disbelief almost entirely consumes her anger, and she has to sit back down. Did she tell Lore to mind his own business? It’s the kind of thing she can easily think a hundred times a day. But to speak it aloud?
Lore looks surprised, though not crestfallen. He sputters an apology, and though Ellen interrupts to say, “I’m sorry … please, it doesn’t matter,” she’s lying. Lore probably doesn’t realize how much his question does matter. No, she doesn’t know her daughter anymore. And because of Lilian Stone, Peg has become ashamed of her mother. She doesn’t say so, but she won’t even look at Ellen these days, if she can avoid it, won’t admit that they share blood and history.
Ellen sinks back into the silence that usually would seem ordinary but now is charged with tension. So Lore’s son has a crush on her daughter. Puppy love, she tells herself. He’ll outgrow it. And Peg has a crush on Lilian Stone, who acts like she’s just stepped from a movie screen to have a look around at real life. Peg is dazzled. Peg, the daughter of a housekeeper.
Now Ellen and Lore could try to pretend that they never had this conversation—Lore’s preference, apparently, since he’s counting the ceiling cracks again. Or they could follow through and say what remains to be said. Uncharacteristically, Ellen decides to try the latter, partly because she’s sorry for lashing out at Lore and partly because she needs to unburden herself.
“You’re right—” She stops to wait out the nine chimes of the clock in the hallway, then she starts over. “You’re right to blame Peg.”
“It’s not her fault. She was born lucky. If being beautiful is lucky. I’m not sure. Is it?”
“How should I know!” she says laughing, unable to suppress the coquettish lilt in her own voice. She touches her cheek, as though to feel the inevitable blush. “It is Peg’s fault,” she insists, impassioned by embarrassment. “Peg is silly enough to think that Mrs. Craxton’s guest has taken an interest in her. An interest! Lilian Stone will forget Peg as soon as she is among her own people again. My daughter has expectations. She thinks she’s slated for the high and mighty. Lawn tennis and caviar. I don’t know what to do with her, Lore.”
As soon as she utters Lore’s name, Ellen regrets telling him so much. Implied in the name is excessive trust. And more than that. It’s as though her worry over her daughter had become a pretext as she’d spoken, until, by the final sentence, she hears herself appeal to Lore for something else, a personal kind of reassurance. Not that she’s attracted to him, no more than she longs to possess any object in the house. But for a brief spell she let loneliness get the best of her. There is no mistaking her meaning. So she understands why Lore chooses to end the conversation here, politely but resolutely.
“Don’t blame Peg,” he says, resting one hand on top of Ellen’s. “Blame the influence.” His palm is wide, thickened with calluses, slightly damp in the center yet with a smooth surface like sanded plaster. Ellen waits for him to go on, to fill the room with the noise of his voice and drown out the pounding in her ears. But he’s given Ellen a worthy piece of advice, and that’s enough. She slips her hand away, manages a nod, and leaves him to the less shrill cogitations of his own mind.
* * *
Whatever her suspicions, Ellen forgets them in sleep, so she’s unaware that during the dead hours of most every night, Peg sneaks down to Lily’s bedroom. Now here’s Lily lying on her immense bed blowing doughnuts of cigarette smoke into the air while beside her Peg searches the pillow for feathers, pinching each tiny shaft between her thumb and forefinger and pulling the fluffy down out through the cotton. They are such fast friends, though they’ve known each other only six weeks. Who would have thought? Peg hadn’t realized how desperate she’d been for proper company, nothing to do for fun in this howling wilderness but blow apart owls. Now this is fun! Lying on a king-size bed and whispering. Peg can imagine the sun beating down—they are castaways floating on a raft, they’ve been given up for lost, they will never go home. But this brings to mind the one difference between them. Not money—since Lily doesn’t care that she has it. Not education—Lily may be more refined, but Peg has more information in her head and can entertain Lily for hours describing such bizarre things as the breeding habits of garden slugs. And not adventure, as it turns out. For every chapter Lily adds to the story of her upbringing, Peg can tell her about falling through the ice into Craxton’s Pond when she was seven, skinning a deer, or shooting snowy owls. Lily has helped Peg to appreciate her memories, has even taken to wandering through the woods alone for hours at a time because, as she says, she wants to memorize the beautiful countryside and take it home with her.
But this is their point of difference: home. Lily has a home. She can leave it and return. That Peg and her mother have a garret room to themselves at all is a favor bestowed upon them by a petulant old woman who prefers not to live in an isolated mansion by herself. Peg has come to despise Mrs. Craxton for her power, though lately she pretends, in her mother’s place, to dote on her. Home. She privately wishes that Lily would invite her home. There she would live as a guest, not as a servant, and over time she would be treated as a member of the family. This used to be an idle daydream, but as their friendship has intensified, Peg has let herself think of it as a real possibility. Why not? Lily makes no effort to hide her affection for Peg. In some ways, she seems the more rapacious companion—she hates to pass a night apart and is generous with hugs and vows of commitment. They’ve already anticipated the dismal separation ahead and have promised to write each other every day after Lily has left. But perhaps she won’t be satisfied with letters. Perhaps she’s weighing the options while she smokes her cigarette.
There’s something on her mind, something important, Peg senses, and she’s decided to wait for Lily to reveal it on her own. The circlets of smoke make up a coded message. What could she be thinking? She’s been quieter than usual tonight, almost timid, or perhaps she’s just collecting reasons for inviting Peg to live with her next spring. Is this what she’s contemplating? Are they close enough to share thoughts? Peg still can’t believe that she has such a grand friend, and she’s sorry that they have to keep their friendship a secret. But Lily fears Mrs. Craxton would disapprove. Maybe so. Peg’s no excitable young man with bursting glands, though—there’s not that kind of danger! But Lily may be right, and Peg doesn’t want to risk an early separation by testing the old woman’s jealousy.
When Lily finally speaks, the subject, so distant from the one in her own mind, disappoints Peg. “Last night I had the strangest dream.” She pauses to stamp out her cigarette. “I dreamed that I was in a desert outside Jerusalem with my family, on one of my father’s expeditions.” Peg listens with a dazed curiosity just short of rapture. She rolls onto her back and stares at the ceiling as though reading the text of Lily’s dream in the cracks. “My brothers were finding all the pretty trinkets, while I found nothing,” Lily continues. “But I kept on digging, and finally, my fingers scraped against a hard object—a piece of tile loose enough so I was able to wrench it free. I remember cool air blowing against my face as I put my hand through the hole left by the tile. I pulled away more tile, and when the hole was wide enough I lowered myself into the room below.
“I knew—the way you just know things in a dream without having to ask—I knew that I’d discovered the true Jerusalem, more ancient than the existing city. It was the oldest city in the world, and I had found it. I saw stone steps leading from one side of the room to a dirt corridor, and from there … from there, I assumed, into the maze of the streets. But suddenly I felt scared—I’m not sure why. I guess I didn’t want to be alone anymore.
“I climbed out of the hole. My family had disappeared. The desert stretched as far as I could see. I started to walk, hoping that I was heading in the direction of Jerusalem—the fake Jerusalem—and our hotel. In the distance I noticed a speck of gray bouncing along the sand. When it came nearer I saw it was a bull, its horns glittering, as though tipped with diamonds. I started to run away, but I knew I couldn’t escape, that sooner or later it would catch up and kill me. This was the feeling that woke me—the terrible certainty that I was going to die.”
Peg believes, in the same strange way that Lily had described knowing in a dream without having to ask, that this dream concerns her. Though she wasn’t present, somehow, implicitly, she figured in the dream, and as much for her own sake as for Lily’s, she wants to make sense of it. A desert. An underground city. A bull with diamond horns. Diamond horns? She decides that a bawdy gloss on the illusive dream is called for, and she starts to laugh before she has come up with an appropriate joke. She glances at Lily, expecting her to answer with a giggle since they’re so in tune, so perfectly matched that they don’t even need a punch line. Their laughter is infectious—usually. But Lily’s expression remains unchanged, indecipherable, except for a slight crease between her eyebrows, which suggests that she has taken her dream much too seriously. And before Peg can figure out how to reassure her, Lily’s eyes glaze over, and a tear spills out and slides halfway down her cheek with the rubbery bounce of a spider dropping on a thread.
“Oh Lily!” Of course Peg throws her arms around her friend. Of course she smooths her hair and hushes her, though Lily hasn’t made a sound. And of course Lily buries her face in Peg’s neck. They love each other. What follows, then, seems natural, and if in the back of their minds these two girls know that this is no experiment of youth, the import of their actions only makes the loving more solemn.
One moment Lily’s hand rests innocently on Peg’s shoulder, and the next moment it has crawled down and is caressing her left breast—tentatively, while Peg lies still, barely breathing, and then, because Peg doesn’t resist, more confidently. With a few quick tugs Lily undoes the buttons of Peg’s nightgown and slides her hand inside, against the skin. Peg notices the other hand cupped against the back of her head only when the pressure increases slightly, and she relaxes her neck and tilts her head forward. This is what Lily wants, isn’t it? Yes, she has raised her lips to meet Peg’s, and they kiss, sinking into each other’s mouths. Peg’s excitement feeds upon itself—the thrill of this love makes her insatiable for more, and instead of simply receiving Lily she slides on top of her, separating her thighs with her knee and then pressing up against her groin, an act in itself so full of consequence that for a split second paranoia subsumes pleasure, and Peg pulls away and looks toward the door, certain that someone is watching. The door remains closed; they are alone. But she has broken the spell, and when she looks down again she sees fear—Lily’s, or the reflection of her own fear in Lily’s eyes. She rests her head on Lily’s chest, knowing that now they can’t continue, not tonight, at least. The effort of transgression has exhausted them, and they lie in each other’s arms without speaking.
* * *
Take away the hum of a refrigerator, the click and rush of forced-air heat controlled by a thermostat, the buzz of telephone wires, the distant whine of a highway, and the dense silence of a country house in winter crushes against the ears with the deafening pressure of many fathoms of water. Even the mechanical ticking of the clocks scattered throughout the Manikin doesn’t relieve the haunting silence. And this is the paradox: that an enclosed space could be so deafening and silent at the same time, so full and so empty, as if inhabited by ghosts. Perhaps our minds conjure spirits because we cannot stand such complete silence. And maybe all the stuffed animals in the world—not just the ones with real hides and feathers but the nursery animals as well, and dolls with glass eyes, statues too, and portraits, photographs, postage stamps, coins embossed with images of monarchs and presidents, bas-relief heads, gargoyles, masks, puppets, wooden angels, and anything else that never closes its eyes in sleep—maybe all of them are made not to be seen in daylight but to exist unseen at night, to fill the emptiness as nocturnal animals fill the woods, invisibly, so that there is no interior without life.
The Manikin’s collection of animals has this effect. To someone wandering through the living room in the middle of the night, with only a paltry bit of moonlight to see by, the animals crowded on the platform seem alive and dead at the same time, frozen forever in their last act. The apprehension they inspire at that late hour can be oddly comforting, more so to the residents familiar with the animals in daylight than to the stranger who has crept in through the unlocked kitchen door, walked slowly down the dark hallway into the living room, and after a few minutes made his way out again. Such a man requires a strong nerve, or else he’ll move too hastily in an effort to escape the animals, and he’ll knock over a coffee table or a chair and will raise the household with his clatter.
But phantoms retreat at the first hint of morning, their purpose made obsolete by roosters and dogs and crows. Wake up, everyone, wake up! the world cries. Christmas is only a week away!