Later, Alligator

I was less than three hours sober when they came to take away my pretty, young wife. They came in a white car with no lights or words on it. The doctors, for such I supposed them to be by virtue of their white lab coats, were uniformly taciturn of expression and never once said a humane word to me. A lot of mumbled, "since October of last year?" and, "when was the last time she had her dose of laudanum?" I gave them all the answers it was within me to give, then retreated into my office in the garret. I felt that, if I watched them take her away from the vantage point of the window in the high gable, it would make the whole process feel unreal and less substantial, the way that some people report looking over their own corpse when they have died for a short space and promptly returned. Before long, they had bundled her in the straightwaistcoat and put two of her suitcases in the car alongside her. She did not look up towards the window, merely showed her back to me and the long strands of dark brown hair fell limply against the dull, white therapeutic vice that pinioned her arms.

The dust from the sanitarium's car had scarcely fallen back to the earth when my parents' freshly-waxed black coupe thundered down the drive. The hood ornament, a silver hawk, menaced me as I walked out on the porch to greet them.

"I'm sorry," I said, "you already missed her. She's just left."

"Well that's no matter," my mother said, bustling past me to the door. Father followed behind her, holding his hat in his hand and floating at her heels like a wraith. The hollow expression on his tall, gaunt face was the only sign in the visible universe of the morning's earlier tragedy.

In a blink, there we were. The sitting room was as dusty as it ever was. The reheated cakes were beginning to return to their natural state, and the steaming coffee was the only perceptible sign of life. I busied myself studying the cupids and cherubs, half covered in soot and dust, chasing one another beneath the crown moulding. I glanced at the whiskey in the decanter by Father's elbow, decided I preferred the pale gray nothing to the warm amber blanket of intoxication, and declined internally. I had decided I liked the pain, actually.

"It's time, I think, son, to begin the search anew," said my mother, unperturbed. She waved a cigarette carelessly, like a child with a lit match.

"Mother," I said, "she's just gone to sanitarium for a few months. The doctors say that such hysterias are easily treatable with ample rest and some of the new therapies they're trying..." I trailed off, knowing that I was just speaking hollow claptrap. My mother-in-law had disappeared into that sanitarium by the seashore a decade ago. Her mother before that. Swallowed whole, like they had never existed. A cloud of uncertainty hung over me, but then when did it ever not?

"Still," she continued, tactlessly, "in the event that she does not return, you should begin to make arrangements. After all, a significant fortune rests on your shoulders, my son, a significant fortune." She gestured to the house in general. "Your great grandfather built this magnificent house like he built our family: with wisdom and shrewd business sense. You should run it just the same. Marriage is a business contract, after all."

I nodded glumly. "Mother, you are always practical. I would like to be impractical for a while. Surely great grandfather's luxury could afford me that," I did not add: "Just as it has afforded you your fancy cars, trips to Europe, and vampiric hanger-on socialite friends."

She dismissed me with a perfunctory wave of her hand. "You are a man, you should think and act manfully. Make yourself worthy of your great grandfather's house, or perhaps I will no longer suffer you to live in it."

I let the threat pass by without taking it, as I had let many such darts in life fall across me. In the ten years of my marriage, she had threatened often and acted never.

The rest of the luncheon passed by with talk of Europe and Turkey, strange foods and exotic places and the idiosyncratic ways of the foreign peoples she had seen. Father floated by the window, cup in hand, surely bilocating to somewhere beyond that musty room. I was glad to see them gone.

For a few days, I talked to no one and did hardly anything. I made coffee and toast, languished at my desk until dinner time. I telephoned around 6 to ask after my wife, who was always doing "very well," but was likewise "very tired," and couldn't come to the phone. On the third day, I took the car out into town to buy more necessities. I floated through the general store and the post office like a ghost, and just as lightly as I perceived was I perceived in turn: a nod of the head, a "morning, mister," a "that'll be a dollar-fifteen."

I returned from the post office with a bundle of papers from work, which I scratched my signature upon without looking at them or what they said, then festooned them with stamps to go out again. A telephone call from work arrived, was answered, words were exchanged whose import I could scarcely begin to guess at, and then for some reason I remained the rest of the evening by the telephone, perhaps awaiting another call. In vain, it seemed, because it still had not come when the next day arrived.

What did arrive was a letter, from my wife. I exchanged the packet of work documents with the postman for this one few-inches-square envelope, lavender-colored, and it seemed to me like paying Kublai Khan a bag of stones for all the silks in China. I half-ran to the house and I watched myself bolt the latch. I regarded it for a moment, then decided not to open it again. Not even the fresh air and the blue sky could share my pleasure.

I stood by the door to the sitting room. I gingerly opened the envelope with a penknife. Inside, a single bit of folded white cardstock which read, in a crooked but feminine hand:

"I wish to have my paints brought to me, please. Doctor says he will not mind if you bring them to me. Bring the children along too, I miss them terribly. You can find them in the bureau, left drawer.

Hope to see you soon, L."

I stood a while longer and puzzled at it. Then my eyes drifted, naturally, to the door to the studio. It had been shut during her last spell, almost two weeks ago. It seemed then like the door to some temple of sacred solitude. I scarce believed it when my mere mortal hand was able to turn the knob.

Within was everything the way I remembered: the writing desk, the easel and paints, the astrolabe and the globe on the low table, the shelves and shelves of sketchbooks, the pens and pencils scattered upon every surface, and the locked bureau at the far corner of the room, midmorning sunlight invading through Venetian blinds to bleach the ancient wood with stripes.

I worked my key in the lock, but even before the door opened I could hear them, stirring. I opened the left drawer, and there, within the hollow recesses of the padded jewelry box, were six very small dolls. None were larger than my fist. Each was hand-stitched, with skin of light, creme colored napkincloth and clothes made from corduroy. Buttons for eyes, sewed mouths which nevertheless wiggled up and down to form the semicircle of a smile and they all turned to regard me. My hand jerked involuntarily, and all at once they tumbled out upon the floor, but whatever the height of the fall to the scale of their bodies might have suggested, they landed soundlessly and were instantly back upon their feet. They cartwheeled and danced and jeered among each other, all to the tune of the ghostly laughter of children, somewhere, in some unseen dimension of space.

I looked upon them with manifest astonishment, and yet, though to see dolls' faces and dolls' eyes move in such a fashion was, in the abstract, a horror, I found that those countenances contained a note of familiarity. Here a young boy in a sailor's costume, here another dressed as a knight of the Round Table, girls in pastel Easter gowns or in painters' smocks. I gathered them up into my arm and I felt, for the first time, what a father must feel holding his child. There was color and texture to me again, if only a little.

To see the way they jumped and pantomimed and ran through the house was like seeing morning glories burst open at the first rays of sunshine. The toys in the empty nursery, little cars and blocks with letters written on them, were man-sized to their eyes and I could scarce tear myself away from the wonder of their play. Telephones rang and were ignored. Mail from work came and found itself piled in the unused garret office. The whiskey decanter in the sitting room seemed to have regenerated itself with lack of use. Life had come from nothing. All attention rested upon the miracle.

And in a few days' time, I had gathered all of the painting supplies and made preparations for the visit to the sanitarium. The living dolls busied themselves helping with those preparations, or simply being a nuisance, taking the phone off the hook or spreading their playthings and craft projects all about the various empty rooms.

The day of the trip came, and we were all in excitement. It was a long drive along a narrow strip of stone-shingled beaches and rocky coastline. All the way the motor seemed to hum like the distant droning of an airplane passing overhead. The sun and the waves conspired to make the air at once refreshing and clean. All under heaven was well.

By late afternoon, we had descended into the town by the cape, the sanitarium looming overhead like an Aegyptian obelisk, chasing the sun beneath the waves. After making arrangements at the inn, I made up my mind to walk the rest of the distance to sanitarium.

People were coming home from the beaches, and there were purveyors and their carts selling all manner of fare, even as the day withered away. The dolls, which rode in my pocket in place of a handkerchief, made evident to me by a series of frantic gestures that they wanted a balloon from one of the carts. I payed the man for one, a round man with no beard to speak of, an androgyne sort of face, large and round with lit coals for eyes. "I think they're wanting another, boy," he said in a grandfatherly voice. I paid him a dollar for a bundle and he merely winked, nodded, and he watched as I continued on my way.

Up the hill we climbed. I was holding the balloons. Gradually, the dolls wormed their way out of my pocket and rode upon my arms to help me carry them. I had scarce moved another hundred feet before I began to notice them, like dandelion seeds, floating away on the breeze, one by one, each carried aloft by a brightly-colored poppyflower of helium and rubber. One by one they soared on the ocean breezes and I, like a man possessed, flying across the railing and down to the craggy shore, tears stinging my eyes, thorns snatching at my clothes, screaming and crying and laughing all at once. "Come back!" I shouted until I was hoarse. "Where are you going? Come back!"

The last figure riding upon the poppy stems, silhouetted by the sun, smallest of them all, waved a warm goodbye. I could see in the gesture the childish wave one gives a friend from the back of a parent's car, a salute that says: "I'll see you later!" And I knew, just like children, that the parting would feel longer than it really was. And I was, in some small measure, a little glad, even as I choked on my tears.

A man leaving work at the sanitarium noticed me and came to help me. I saw, for the first time, a friendly face perched atop a white labcoat.

"Sounds like you had a bit of a nervous episode," he said, nonchalantly, "happens to all of us sometime. You said this was the first time it's ever happened to you?"

"The first time," I nodded.

"Then I wouldn't trouble yourself about it, just..." He seemed to be looking over his shoulder. "Don't say anything about it while you're up there."

I nodded sullenly. Looking out the window, I noticed the place where the balloon-seller's cart had been. Not a trace of him remained. It was only a few minutes to the top of the hill, and only a few more past the front desk into the little room where the patients had their visitors. The art supplies had already been taken by a nurse with a scowling expression and carried away, presumably to my wife's room.

The visitor's room was bisected by a wall half of plaster and half of clear glass. Two telephones on either side. I sat staring into her face, pretty as birdsong and as dark and deep as the sea, before I picked up the phone on my end. She seemed to have found some of the strength that she had lost over the past few weeks, when I had seen her shrivel and fade away before my eyes. She was already crying, crying and smiling simultaneously.

"They're gone, aren't they?"

"How did you...?"

"I knew they would be. That's just how its got to be, stupid of me to think otherwise."

I remembered the raw, chest-rending pain, on the beach, the last doll floating away from me on a red balloon.

She continued: "The chaplain says it's no use worrying, that these things happen all the time. That all I can do is hope and pray."

I nodded, suddenly quiet. Then I said, "but what does he know? They're just waiting for us, darling, I know they are. They've got a fun game, you see, that they want to teach us, and..."

The deep, wretching sobs broke from my lips like waves crashing on the rocks, and for a long time I heaved and sighed and breathed deep and then began to cry again. She was crying too, I could tell, but also smiling. When I looked up again, she was a picture of broken serenity and I said: "I never learned to play games, darling. I was practically born practical and I want to be impractical all the rest of my life."

"That's the thing, isn't it?" She broke in. "If we're to be any fun at the game, we've got to learn to play, real play, you know, not the way adults pretend to play when they've decided they're just too important and old to have fun."

"We'll teach each other," I said, a bit hopeful.

"And maybe, later, we'll be ready."