Free Morgan's Passing by Anne Tyler Page B

no harm. He never threatened them or even came within speaking distance of them; there was nothing to complain of. Really, Emily was taking this too fancifully, Leon said. The man was only something to be adjusted to, as a matter of course. He was part of the furniture of their lives, like the rowhouses looming down Crosswell Street, the dusty, spindly trees dying of exhaust fumes, and the puppets hanging in their muslin shrouds from the hooks in the back-bedroom closet.

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    N ow that it was winter, business had slacked off. There had been a little burst around Christmas (holiday bazaars, parties for rich people’s children), but none of the open-air fairs and circuses that kept them so busy in the summer. Emily used the time to build a new stage—a wooden one, hinged and folded for portability. She repaired the puppets and sewed more costumes for them. A few she replaced completely, which led to the usual question of what to do with the oldones. They were like dead bodies; you couldn’t just dump them in the trashcan. “Use them for spare parts,” Leon always said. “Save the eyes. Save that good nose.” Put Red Riding Hood’s grandmother’s pockmarked cork-ball nose on any other puppet? It wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t be right. Anyway, how could she tear that face apart? She laid the grandmother in a carton alongside a worn-out Beauty from “Beauty and the Beast”—the very first puppet she’d ever made. They were on their third Beauty at the moment, a much more sophisticated version with a seamed cloth face. It wasn’t the plays that wore the puppets out; it was the children coming up afterward, patting the puppets’ wigs and stroking their cheeks. Beauty’s skin was gray with fingerprints. Her yellow hair had a tattered, frantic look.
    This whole room belonged to the puppets: the hollow back bedroom, with peeling silvery pipes shooting to the ceiling and a yellow rain stain ballooning down one wall. The window was painted shut, its panes so sooty that the sun set up an opaque white film in the afternoons. The wooden floor put splinters in Gina’s knees and turned her overalls black. The china doorknob was hazy with cracks. The door hung crooked. Nights, when Emily worked late in the glow of one goose-necked lamp, the hall light that shone beneath the door was not a rod but a wedge, like a very long piece of pie.
    She sat up late and repaired the witch, the all-purpose stepmother-witch that was used in so many different plays. No wonder she kept wearing out! One black button eye dangled precariously. Emily perched upon the stepladder that was the room’s only furniture and tied a knot in a long tail of thread.
    The puppets most in use were kept in an Almadén chablis box in the corner. They poked their heads out of the cardboard compartments: two young girls (one blonde, one brunette), a prince, a green felt frog, a dwarf. The others stayed in muslin bags in the closet, with name tags attached to the drawstrings:
Rip Van W. Fool. Horse. King
. She liked to change them aroundfrom time to time, assign them roles they were not accustomed to. Rip Van Winkle, minus his removable beard, made a fine Third Son in any of those stories where the foolish, kind-hearted Third Son ends up with the princess and half the kingdom. He fitted right in. Only Emily knew he didn’t belong, and it gave a kind of edge to his performance, she felt. She ran him through his lines herself. (Leon played the older two sons.) She put an extra, salty twang in his voice. The real Third Son, meanwhile—more handsome, with less character—lay face-up backstage, grinning vacantly.
    Emily had never actually planned to be a puppeteer, and even now both she and Leon thought of it as temporary work. She had entered college as a mathematics major, on full scholarship—the only girl her age in Taney, Virginia, who was not either getting married the day after graduation