Broken Strings Read online

  BROKEN STRINGS

  Nancy Means Wright

  “Ah! Vanitas vanitatum!

  Which of us is happy in this world?

  Which of us has his desire—

  or having it, is satisfied?

  Come, children, let us shut up the box

  and the puppets, for our play is played out.”

  ~William Makepeace Thackery (1811-1863)

  “We are only puppets, our strings are being pulled by unknown forces.”

  ~Georg Büchner (1813-1837)

  Chapter One

  The Puppeteer Loses Her Touch

  Wednesday, September 19

  The puppeteers, in black masks and stretch leotards that threw Fay Hubbard’s belly into mortifying relief, were lined up behind their marionettes. They stood in plain sight, as if to say that this was a play, not reality at all, and that the children who were squatting, wide-eyed, on the floor of the Branbury Village School needn’t worry when the bad fairy came in to prick young Beauty and put her to sleep for a hundred years. It was all artifice.

  Why then was Fay feeling anxious – when, good heavens, she’d been in forty-odd plays in her checkered past? Usually after a few unnerving moments when she first walked out on the stage, she’d get over the shakes and roll forward into the heart of the drama. Offstage for a scene, she’d be raring to go back on; and when the curtain dropped at the end she could hardly wait for the curtain call, to drink in the applause of the crowd like caramel cream.

  But this play had been going for ten minutes already, and Fay knew what would happen in the end. Beauty would be awakened by the handsome Prince, yes. But puppeteer Marion had written a new ending for the classic Sleeping Beauty tale and it wasn’t a happy one. It was sad; in fact, it dredged up all of Fay’s anxieties about dying. She wasn’t alone in her peeve with the ending – two people had stood up and booed after the Burlington performance, and one had actually threatened Marion.

  Could she blame them? Fay was a romantic – never mind she was visibly aging, a wrinkle a day. Give her a happy ending any time. Bring on the prince! So what if he reeked of tobacco and garlic?

  “Bar the door!” cried the puppet Queen with a flourish of strings and pink satin arms. “The witch is here!” And Fay, as the good fairy who’d come to bless the baby Beauty, shoved a papier mâché rock against the door. Or shoved it almost to the door, for Fay wasn’t wholly competent at pulling strings. Neither literally nor metaphorically skilled, she thought, for she seldom prevailed with anyone – ex-husband, play directors, the cop who’d nailed her for speeding this morning. Even the three foster kids she cared for – one of whom, the oldest, Chance, was operating a fairy and wanting out of here. The girl was already checking her watch.

  The onlookers squealed, and in burst the uninvited guest: the evil Nightshade, clad all in red – ruby red heels and glittery spikes of orangey-red hair. Operated by Marion’s husband, Cedric, the witch hovered motionless and menacing by the door while the King and Queen, worked by Marion’s multiple controller, blessed the fairies with hugs.

  Now the witch was on the move in her blood-red gown, her carved features cross as a cat locked out on a cold porch. The Queen cradled the child close to her silk bosom; she’d been made in the image of beautiful mulatto Marion, a woman of forty-two who looked eighteen with her shiny black curls and pale brown skin tinted pink on chin and cheeks. While here was Fay with her wild mop of gray-brown untinted hair, and breasts that seemed to sag a little more each day as she hurtled through her fifties toward that big Six-O.

  “One day your Beauty will prick her finger and die!” Nightshade screeched in Cedric’s cracked falsetto. Cackling horribly, she hurled a live rose at Beauty and a drop of red ink sprang out on the infant’s forehead.

  “She shouldn’t of throwed that flower,” a child squealed in the front row, “it weren’t nice,” and everyone laughed. For a moment the ice was broken. And when Fay’s fairy in a yellow tutu shouted, “Wait! Here is my gift and I say Beauty will not die,” the whole room burst into applause, and a tremor like a scatter of frozen peas skittered down Fay’s spine.

  There was a moment’s reprieve, a short intermission of cookies and Kool-Aid, while backstage in the chaos of costumes, tiaras, masks, strings and feathers, puppeteer Marion was sipping her herb tea and arguing with Cedric about her new ending. And for once Fay was on Cedric’s side. Who wanted Beauty to wither into an old woman before the prince could consummate the marriage? A century later the wedding day would come and the prince would find his bride tottering down the aisle in her moth-eaten gown?

  “It’s revolting,” Cedric growled. “The whole idea of Beauty shriveling up in front of my eyes –” he corrected himself – “the prince’s eyes. You don’t know human nature, Marion.”

  “Oh but I do,” said practical Marion, who was Cedric’s senior by twelve years and didn’t try to hide the fact. “I’ll age. When you’re fifty-eight, love, I’ll be seventy. Think of that. And will you banish me from your bed?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Anyway, who’s going to keep her looks for a hundred years? It’s what life is. You can’t hide that from kids. They can’t live out their lives in a fairy tale.”

  Marion turned to unhook the teenage Beauty puppet on its brand new controller – she’d hear no rebuttal. Fay caught Cedric Fox’s eye and blinked in sympathy. But the blue Fox eye was cold. Cedric wasn’t happy, he hadn’t been consulted. He hadn’t wanted to be part of the Valentini Theater in the first place. But then he’d lost his engineering job, Marion had a thriving troupe going, and so he jumped in, head, hands and cash. And now was ready to jump out, judging by the scowl on his thin lips.

  And take his money with him? Fay wondered. How much money was left? Prodigal Marion too often performed for free, the scowl said. Schools shouldn’t have to pay, she insisted.

  “Stupid,” he told Fay, his thirty-year-old forehead pleating. “We’re at an elementary school, for Christ sake. And you know what she’s thinking up now? Instead of a prince giving the kiss in the end?”

  Fay didn’t know. She untangled a couple of strings and scrubbed at a stain in the queen’s gown. The hem was ripped, too, but there wasn’t time to sew it. Anyway, Fay was no seamstress. Back home, she’d even wrapped her mama goat’s split hock in a yard of duct tape – Fay was raising goats to make goat cheese, trying to make a living. The marionettes were little more than a volunteer job.

  “A vampire,” Cedric said. “A vampire to give Beauty the wakeup smooch? Ridiculous.” He tightened his hands around the witch’s neck as though this was what he’d like to do to his wife.

  Neanderthal, Fay thought. Kids loved vampires—though personally, they weren’t her cup of tea. She took a step back, a shivery breath. In the coming scene her fairy was to carry Beauty off the stage and Fay worried about dropping her. She signaled the puppeteer for help.

  “Here,” said Marion, putting down her herb tea to show Fay how. It was all so easy when Marion did it. After all, she’d studied under a puppeteer father. Fay was merely a failed actress, substituting a puppet for her own face before an audience.

  “Never mind Cedric, he’ll come round. I’ll work on him,” Marion said with more confidence than Fay could muster up. Fay had seen Cedric’s icy blue eyes – it was like staring into the eye of a hurricane.

  “Places,” Marion was calling out. “Scene Two!” The children were reassembling. Fay saw her foster boy, Beets, squat in the front row with the cell phone his father had sent – it had better not ring!

  The teachers were yelling, “No talking! No drinks in the assembly room!”

  “We’re on, guys,” said Marion. Fay took a breath, and the four masked puppeteers moved along behind the stage with their stringed puppets. />
  It was Beauty’s eighteenth birthday. The marionette took her place in the center, a smiling creature with black flowing curls like her creator, a white organdy gown threaded with gold and glass. Balloons and paper lanterns floated overhead; blue, yellow, and pink paper flowers fluttered in the palace garden. The teachers made shushing noises again and the scene began.

  One by one the fairies arrived with gifts of books, slippers, bracelets, flowered gowns; Chance’s fairy dropped chocolates at Beauty’s feet. The taped music rose to a crescendo and the door swung open to reveal – Nightshade again! Nightshade, her ugly face almost hidden behind a bouquet of thorny red roses. The Queen scurried to shut her out but Nightshade prevailed. With deadly accuracy, she flung the bouquet at Beauty; the puppet squealed with pleasure – and then pain as she pricked her finger. Beauty slumped sideways over the embroidered arm of her chair.

  “She will not die!” Fay’s fairy shouted. But out front there was an outcry from teachers and children. Fay looked down to see Beauty’s controller with its multiple strings collapse into a tangled heap, and puppeteer Marion gag, then stumble off the set, clutching her chest and throat, as if she, too, were headed for a hundred years of sleep.

  * * *

  Fay didn’t believe in the paranormal, but this time the witch’s thorns had pricked her disbelief. Marion, it seemed, when she and Cedric arrived at the hospital behind the ambulance, had truly been struck down by a witch.

  “You needn’t stay,” Cedric told Fay. “Someone has to go back and pack up.” His hand was on his wife’s shoulder where she lay in a blue hospital gown on the emergency room gurney. He was stroking her clavicle almost absent-mindedly, his jay eyes fixed on the boxes of white surgical gloves attached to the wall.

  “I’m staying,” Fay said. Poor Marion lay on her side, gazing with dilated pupils at the ochre wall, her lips the color of the surgical gloves, skin red as Nightshade’s gown, her heartbeats as rapid as Fay’s old washing machine in a spin cycle. She’d been vomiting up blood. Quarts of water, it seemed, oozed from her skin. Her blood pressure was soaring. She’d retched over and over in the ambulance, the medic said, might have swallowed some of it before they got her onto the gurney.

  The young male nurse, his green gown spattered with blood, had finished taking her pulse. Fay didn’t have to ask to know it was fast – like a speedboat headed for a rocky shore. Marion’s body was shaking now, convulsing; Cedric’s eyes went back to her. The nurse turned the woman on her side until the trembling stopped.

  “She’s not an epileptic,” Cedric told the nurse, “if that’s what you’re thinking. She’s perfectly healthy, never sick a day. Must be something she ate. Why isn’t the doctor here?”

  “He’s coming,” the nurse said, trying to sound calm. He stuck a thermometer in Marion’s ear.

  “Off wi’ his head!” Marion screeched and flung the instrument back at him.

  “Marion,” Cedric admonished, “this young man is trying to help you.”

  “Off wi’ his head!” she cried again, like the Red Queen in her Alice in Wonderland show, and the frustrated nurse gave up on the thermometer.

  “You don’t need that thing to see she’s in a fever,” Fay told the fellow. “It’s all right to be angry, Marion. Go right ahead.” She patted the sick woman’s arm.

  “Get the doctor. Now,” Cedric Fox told the nurse, pointing at the door, and the man blanched. He’d been trying. This was a busy place, in a college town where students were always trying to kill themselves with drink, drugs, skates, skis, snowboards, or simply meandering across highways as if they were immortal.

  “Queens neva make bargains,” Marion cried, her pupils a shiny black, her breath quick and chugging like a train gathering speed. She pointed a finger at the nurse, who was frantically ringing for assistance, his temples awash. They hadn’t trained him for this, Fay thought.

  “Queens neva –” Marion shouted.

  Cedric cried, “Enough, Marion! Lie still, damn it! The doctor’s coming.”

  “…make bargains,” Marion finished. Then, in a moment of lucidity: “Carry on the show, both of you – promise me!” Fay nodded and wiggled a pair of fingers. “Chance can do Beauty.”

  “We will, but you get better, love.” Fay wiped her friend’s head with a tissue. “And no bargains, no. You can say whatever you like.” She glared at Cedric, who was sweating profusely. He was pulling off the black sweatshirt he’d thrown on over his leotard.

  Cedric wanted things orderly. Well or ill, his wife should behave in a quiet, cool way.

  He preferred the way she ran Valentini’s Marionettes, her finger on every pulse, marionettes laid out in order of entrance, scripts firmly in hand, the ending pre-planned – if not always acceptable to its performers.

  Was it Fay’s imagination, or was Marion’s comely face beginning to wrinkle in front of their eyes as she lay back on the flat gurney pillow? No, it was still forty-two-year old Marion there in the loose hospital gown they’d wrapped her in on arrival, her light brown skin mottled red but cooling. The rich brown eyes closed now under puffy lids, as though the puppeteer was slowly disappearing, burrowing deep into herself. Cedric called her name but there was only the barest twitch of cheek muscle. “She’s sleeping,” he said. “That’s good. She’ll be all right.” He smiled, as if to say Marion was being a good girl. She would soon wake and life would be in order again. She’d make his dinner.

  At last. The doctor. The nurse making way for his entrance, like the doctor was a prince coming to release Marion from sleep. He was bending low over his patient, hands and instruments probing. “Chronic ailments?” he asked. “Diabetes? Heart? Cancer?”

  Cedric shook his head, annoyed. It was all on the information sheet he’d completed when they came in. Obviously, his face said, the doctor hadn’t read it.

  “What did she have for breakfast? For lunch? Dinner last night?” Questions Cedric couldn’t wholly answer. Marion was up at six each day, she breakfasted alone, he told the doctor, though Fay, who milked her goats at a quarter of five in a sleepy trance, couldn’t blame the fellow for staying in bed.

  “Um, dinner last night, yes, well, roast rabbit,” Cedric said. “We had rabbit. Shot it myself. It was raiding our garden. The last of the lettuce, cukes, tomatoes. Marion cooks. I take care of the garden.”

  Fay knew, for Marion had e-mailed her. ‘Cedric shot Peter Rabbit,’ Marion had typed. ‘I was sketching from the window and Ced went out and shot him. How could he do that!’

  The doctor’s scruffy eyebrows drew together. As though who knew what the rabbit had been eating? A rabid rabbit? He took notes. He appeared calm as a summer day, not a cloud crossing his antiseptic face.

  “Nothing more you know of?” he asked. Cedric held out his empty palms. And finally the doctor swung into action. “Some kind of food poisoning, I expect,” he told the clipboard he’d been holding. He threw out orders: gastric lovage… tannic acid solution… something else Fay couldn’t hear, since she was being summarily dismissed, literally pushed out of the room. Only Cedric could remain, the doctor said, the legal relation.

  The one who’d poisoned her? a serpent hissed in Fay’s head. The last word she heard as the door swung shut was coma.

  Chapter Two

  Falling Leaves and a Phone Call

  Thursday, September 20

  “And I had to pack up the show,” Chance was saying. “The school principal was sorry about Marion, but she wants a makeup show when Marion recovers. So I told her next weekend.” They were standing in the kitchen, the foster girl’s voice coming from the depths of the refrigerator where she was searching for a can of leftover cranberry juice that young Apple had already drunk. Fay had seen the girl with it.

  “But Marion may not be ready by then.” Fay was in her jeans, pouring iced tea into a thermos, about to milk the goats. Or attempt to. They’d be starving by now, those goats, the three youngest bleating like newborns, though they were a year old.

  Ch
ance had almost emptied the fridge which Fay had freshly stocked early Wednesday morning. Already Fay regretted telling her friend Ruth Willmarth she’d transfer goats and Ruth’s foster kids to her own place for a year while the latter went on an extended honeymoon to Ireland with her Irish lover. But what could Fay do? Her life had been in stasis, she couldn’t land an acting job these dog days, even though she had equity. “Then you or Cedric do the show,” Chance said with her mouth full. “Count me out anyway. I’ll be in Montreal. Me and Billy the Kid.”

  The boyfriend Billy was no kid in spite of his nickname, brought on by the Stetson hat he sometimes wore; he was at least in his mid-twenties, too old for Chance at this tender stage in her life. But Fay let it go. “We can’t two of us do all those marionettes, sweetie, and you know it. Marion needs you to do Beauty. It was her last – ” she paused. She’d been about to say “her last wish.” But Marion was still alive, wasn’t she? Though in a coma. She’d be all right, Fay was reciting an hourly mantra. She’ll be all right, all right, all right, all…

  “Just do it,” she told the foster girl. “You can go to Montreal Sunday if you have to.”

  “’Foo Fighters’ will be gone then,” Chance shouted about some band with a crazy name. She was always shouting these days it seemed, as if the whole world had gone deaf and she had to make herself heard. Two more years and she’d be on her own, no marionette then, her sucked-in cheeks said. No controlling strings. She’d given Fay a hard time from the day the former foster mother left.

  “Marion wants to read that revision of your play,” Fay said softly.

  Chance was working on a kids’ play about goats. Goats that were scapegoats, nanny goats, billy-goats-gruff, man-goats, goatsuckers. It was all one big metaphor. Fay couldn’t understand the whole of it. The goats would keep Apple busy with costumes, too; the nine-year-old girl had quick fingers. Fewer seizures now that she was on the right medication. Foster kids, Fay had discovered, didn’t come without issues. And now Apple’s brother Beets had been suspended from school for five days for hitting a classmate with a green apple – a knockout, apparently. Fay couldn’t condone that!