Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [1]
“Ssh.”
“Your name,” said the Prince. Why didn’t she speak?
Really, the children saw, she was only a puppet. They sat back. Something had snapped. Even the parents looked confused.
Then Cinderella flopped onto her face in a very unnatural way, and a human hand emerged from her skirts and withdrew behind the scrim. The children stared. On the stage lay her dead and empty shell, with her arms flung back as if broken. “Is it over?” a child asked his mother.
“Hush. Sit still. You know that’s not how it ends.”
“Well, where’s the rest, then? Can we go?”
“Wait. Here comes someone.”
It was a grownup, but just barely. He felt his way through the bedsheet that hung at one side of the stage: a dark, thin boy in khakis and a rust-colored corduroy jacket, with a white shirt so old and well washed that all the life had gone out of it. There was something fierce about him—maybe the twist of his mouth, or the defiant way he kept his chin raised. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “Boys and girls …”
“It’s the Prince,” said a child.
“Boys and girls, there’s been … an illness. The play is over. You can get your money at the ticket booth.”
He turned away, not even waiting to see how this would be taken, and fumbled at the sheet. But then he seemed struck by another thought, and he turned back to the audience. “Excuse me,” he said. He ran a hand through his hair again. (No wonder it was so mussed and ropy.) “Is there a doctor in the house?” he asked.
They looked at each other—children, mostly, and most of them under five. Apparently there was no doctor. The boy gave a sudden, sharp sigh and lifted a corner of the sheet. Then someone at the rear of the tent stood up.
“I am a doctor,” he said.
He was a lank, tall, bearded man in a shaggy brown suit that might have been cut from blankets, and on his head he wore a red ski cap—the pointy kind, with a pom-pom at the tip. Masses of black curls burst out from under it. His beard was so wild and black and bushy that it was hard to tell how old he was. Maybe forty? Forty-five? At any rate, older than you’d expect to see at a puppet show, and no child sat next to him to explain his being there. But he craned his head forward, smiling kindly, leading with his long, pinched nose and waiting to hear how he could help. The boy looked relieved; his face lost some of its tension.
“Come with me,” he said. He lifted the sheet higher.
Stumbling over people’s feet, sliding past the children who were already swarming toward the exit, the doctor made his way to the boy. He wiped his palms on his thighs and stooped under the sheet. “What seems to be the trouble here?” he asked.
“It’s her,” said the boy.
He meant the blond girl resting on a heap of muslin bags. She was small-boned and frail, but enormously pregnant, and she sat cradling her stomach—guarding it, looking up at the doctor out of level gray eyes. Her lips were so colorless, they were almost invisible.
“I see,” said the doctor.
He dropped down beside her, hitching up his trousers at the knees, and leaned forward to set a hand on her abdomen. There was a pause. He frowned at the tent wall, weighing something in his mind. “Yes,” he said finally. He sat back and studied the girl’s face. “How far apart are the pains?” he asked.
“All the time,” she said, in Cinderella’s wry voice.
“Constantly? When did they begin?”
“About … an hour ago, Leon? When we were setting up for this performance.”
The doctor raised his eyebrows—two black thickets.
“It would be exceedingly strange,” he said, “if they were so close together this soon.”
“Well, they are,” the girl said matter-of-factly.
The doctor stood up, grunting a little, and dusted off his knees. “Oh, well,” he said, “just to be on the safe side, I suppose you ought to check into the hospital. Where’s your car parked?”
“We don’t have one,” the boy