Twenty-eight

“O grim look’d night, o night with hue so black. O night, which ever art when day is not. O night, o night, alack, alack, alack!”

Now that Guillaudeu stood in the shadows at the edge of the tavern’s crowded garden, he saw that a rough theater had been erected at one end, lit by gas lamps now that the sun was setting. Two costumed men stood on the stage, holding open books in front of them. Women emerged from the tavern with plates and pitchers for the patrons, all of whom were busy heckling the players on the makeshift stage.

It had taken far longer than Guillaudeu expected to reach the outskirts of the village, and he was feeling light-headed.

“I fear my Thisbe’s promise is forgot! And thou wall, thou sweet and lovely wall, that stands between her father’s ground and mine … show me thy chink!” And the men roared as one player, acting the part of the wall, turned his back to the audience, bent over, and lifted his costume to reveal a pale and distinctly hairy backside.

If there had been some courage required for Guillaudeu to venture into this tavern, after pausing at the threshold the amount needed was doubled. He stood outside the gate, invisible (he hoped) to those within. Any remaining daring, which had sustained him as he started this adventure, leaked away. Clutching his satchel, tired and very hungry, he had now lost himself somewhere along the mutable border of things, trying to discern exactly where the world ended and he began.

“O wall, full often hast thou heard my moans, for parting my fair Pyramus and me.”

An uproarious cheer accompanied Thisbe’s arrival onstage. She was a massive woman with rouged cheeks, a piercing voice, and an expansive bosom barely contained by a half-laced corset. Aghast, Guillaudeu watched as she pranced to the wall, who had righted himself and now stood with his arms folded in front of him.

“My cherry lips have often kissed thy stones!” Thisbe shrieked as the wall reached out with both hands and grabbed her ample breasts. The men in the tavern roared, and Guillaudeu nearly turned and ran, but then he saw one of the cooks emerge from the tavern with a huge pot of steaming food. Salivating, he took a step forward. Then another. He kept his eye on an empty place at one of the tables. He unlatched the gate and entered.

“Oh, kiss me through the hole of this vile wall!” Pyramus cajoled.

“I kiss the wall’s hole!” Thisbe crowed, and the wall broke his neutral stance to press his mouth to hers. She promptly pushed his head down into her décolletage, where he snuffled happily and perhaps began to suffocate. “And not your lips at all!”

Guillaudeu crept among the howling men until he was safely seated among them.

Onstage, the threesome shouted their lines and grappled one another from one obscenity to the next. Thisbe lifted her skirts to her knee and both Pyramus and the wall knelt before her with their heads invisible beneath the folds, braying like donkeys.

Sharing the table with Guillaudeu were three large men. These dark-complexioned specimens of Ursus americanus were surely brothers, or at least cousins. Their attention was firmly glued to the stage and their paws wrapped around hefty beer mugs. When they laughed, the closer one’s elbow brushed Guillaudeu’s side.

“Excuse me, sir, does this tavern have rooms?” Guillaudeu ventured.

“Rooms?” The closest brother swung his gaze momentarily in his direction.

“Beds. For the night.”

“This tavern?”

“Yes,” Guillaudeu said. “I’m exhausted.”

The man really looked at him this time. “Not the Pick and Hammer. Never heard of anyone staying here, unless they end up under one of the tables out here. Don’t see many city dandies on these roads, not on foot. They all take the train. Looks like you’ve been walking, though.”

One of the tavern’s cooks came into view and Guillaudeu waved her down. “Ah, a plate, please. What is it you’re serving tonight?”

The red-cheeked woman seemed to be a matriarch of the tavern. “Meat. Potatoes. Cabbage. It’ll be forty cents.”

“And I’d like one of these mugs. Of ale, I suppose it is.”

“Ten cents.” The woman extended her palm. “Fifty, total.”

Guillaudeu reached into the inside pocket of his overcoat for the leather purse that had been Scudder’s so long ago. His fingers dipped deep enough that he should have felt it, but he did not. He pressed his flat waistcoat pockets. The woman watched him unbuckle his satchel and rummage through it; it was an act of denial, though, because he already knew the purse was gone. He had put it in his overcoat pocket.

The woman narrowed her eyes and now had both hands on her hips. “Well?”

“It’s gone. My money.” Color rose to his cheeks and again he felt the boundaries of the world dissolving around him. Beside him the cousins roared in approval of Thisbe and her lover Pyramus.

“If that’s so, sir, you can leave my establishment now.” The cook’s voice was firm and loud. All three Ursus americanus swung their attention onto him.

“We got a downtown confidence man with us tonight, Bernard.” The cook addressed the closest man. “Do you think we ought to call Leo out here?”

“I must have been robbed!” Guillaudeu blurted, trying to extricate himself from the bench without disrupting anyone else. His panic was intense.

“At least we caught him before one of you boys bought him something,” the cook went on. “Now you better leave nicely or I’ll have to call my husband out here.”

“You don’t want that, old man,” one of the cousins said softly.

“I’m going, of course! I didn’t mean anything —”

“Sure, you didn’t. We ain’t fools; you can be sure of that.”

Guillaudeu tumbled over the bench and trotted across the garden and through the gate. As he latched it behind him, another roar erupted, as if he were the joke, not the stage players. He reached the far edge of the tavern yard, now illuminated mostly by the rising moon. On the East River blinked the lights of several boats, and closer to him were the lights of Turtle Bay village, which now seemed forbidding and forbidden because he was penniless. Of course he’d been robbed. He remembered the sharp elbows bumping him as he rushed from the Points and the skinny children following him closely with sharp and hungry eyes. Of course they would snake their little hands into the pockets of a fearful, stupid man.

All along he’d thought if worse came to worst, or when he’d had enough of walking north, he’d just catch the Harlem Railroad home. Suddenly Fourth Avenue seemed as distant as the Sierra Nevada.

But now? A chaos of thoughts tangled in his mind until one pulled free and floated above the others: His time in the field, his exploration of his own country, had only just begun. He was not cold, his stomach was not yet completely empty — he still had a little sausage and bread in his satchel. And, he finally realized, he wasn’t scared. This was New York Island, after all, not the North Pole. He pitched his satchel over one shoulder and like a ghost passed silently through Turtle Bay. Once the village lights were behind him he walked more easily into the night. It never had been places that scared him, even unknown places. It always had been people.

The full vault of heaven presented itself above the orchards, its topography of stars obscured only by an occasional cloud in the foreground. As Guillaudeu walked below it, a great calm unfolded. He stopped frequently to stare upward into the cosmos, and he was comforted by the dispassion he sensed emanating from between the distant stars, from the great humming ether that presided over the city at his back, all people, oceans and continents, and perhaps even harbored the vessel USS Happenstance, Scipio’s ominous figment, somewhere among the planets.

A barn disentangled itself from a dark thicket on the far side of a field, and it seemed to be unattached to any visible farmhouse. It might be a safe place to sleep. He left the road, angling toward the structure with the tall grasses whispering against his legs.

The barn was a huge, octagonal husk. Patches of siding were missing and a faint smoky odor made him think it had burned, though probably long ago. He walked inside the massive structure and among the stalls arranged like facets around the center. A tear in the roof broke the symmetry of the barn’s design. Listening to birds mumbling in the rafters, he walked to the center of the hay-strewn earthen floor. The cobalt patch of sky contrasted with the blackened jagged roof, and Guillaudeu peered up through the hole as if it were a telescope. On some unknown cue, the birds took to the air. Crows, he saw, as they silently rose through the jagged portal. They dispersed into the unbounded world, each black dot tearing its own tiny hole in the heavens.

Guillaudeu pushed as much hay as he could into one of the stalls until he had a decent pallet. He curled there under his overcoat, using his satchel for a pillow. He tucked his clasped hands between his thighs, and when he closed his eyes he was standing at his beloved worktable. Pots of resin, pots of beeswax. Arsenic. Cochineal, calipers, excelsior, camphor. He relaxed. His world collapsed immediately into sleep.

Undulating light danced across his office wall even though the room’s one window was blocked, as usual, by a curtain. He examined his tools, arms folded across his canvas butcher’s apron. Scudder’s voice was in his head, saying words he remembered from long ago: The flawless preparation of a large mammal is a taxidermist’s greatest feat and proof that he is a master of his craft. He smiled because, in the present example, every initial measurement had been accurate. The first incision had been a perfect longitudinal line leading him into the work on a straight and righteous path. The skin had graciously parted from the muscle to receive its salt and arsenic. The bones agreed to their excavation, and the ligaments seemed to release their grip with gratitude. Harmony was what he felt as the herringbone stitch entered his mind and he remembered what he’d been looking for: waxed catgut thread and a curved needle. The skin of a human is decidedly thinner than all other animals, with obviously less hair. It would be impossible to hide the seams, and so his tidiest stitch, the herringbone, would do nicely.

Celia’s manikin was masterfully prepared out of pine, iron, annealed wire, wax, Formula 9 papier-mâché, and her own bones. The manikin now stood apart from the worktable where Celia, as he’d known her, had ceased to be. Her new skeleton awaited the cloak of skin, and Guillaudeu obliged; he could smell the acrid scent of carpenter’s glue and knew he must be quick about it.

Beginning at the head and working down, he used high-grade Dutch beeswax to perfect her brow ridge and eye sockets and fitted two blue glass eyes before laying the veil of skin over her skull. Arranging a specimen’s eyelids always took longer than he expected, but he did not panic. He would finish before the glue became too sticky to work with. The neck needed a few minutes of attention — a few more layers of papier-mâché created the shape of the esophagus just so. He had sculpted her arms exactly right, as well as her chest and rib cage. He began sewing at her armpit, his stitches catching the shoulders, and then the arms, in place. He then sewed down her sides to the waist to secure her torso. He politely sewed her well-intentioned but now uncloven femininity and continued on his way down her legs. He finished at the ankles, where the cured skin tucked nicely into the tops of the plaster feet. He tied a neat knot and cut the thread. With growing excitement, he made the final arrangement of her features — applying wax, using tiny spatulas and dentist’s tools to get the shape of her lips, and then resin to get the color.

Guillaudeu unbound her hair and combed it. He dressed her carefully in soft old underthings, her thick woolen stockings, and a muslin shift. He unhooked all the buttons down the back of her dark gray velvet dress and lifted it over her head. As he pulled the sleeves up over her newly arranged arms, the fabric slid gently into place. He buttoned her up and fitted her favorite lace collar about her neck. He coiled her hair into a bun and tied it with a gray silk ribbon. Into her crooked arms he placed The Seraphim and Other Poems, her favorite.

He took off his bloodied apron and stepped back. A work of art, he recalled from his years as Scudder’s apprentice, is not complete until beheld by its audience. From the sheath of her newly donned skin, the specimen regarded him slyly. He circled her. The height, her posture, the expression, and the way she held the volume of poetry. He’d gotten her just right.

His triumph sent him directly to the waking world, where for a few moments he could not move. His heart raced. Where was he? Gradually he made out some form in the darkness. He smelled the faint charcoal of a fire long past and the hulking shape of the barn surrounding him. His heart rate calmed as he recognized his surroundings, but accelerated again as the shadow of his triumph returned and he recalled the dream to which it belonged.