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By Root 457 0

who he was. Coming home from a shopping trip at twilight, they’d been chilled by a kind of liquid darkness flowing in and out of alleyways behind them. Emily had been frightened. Leon had been angry, but with Emily next to him and Gina in his arms he hadn’t wanted to force anything. They had merely walked a little faster, and spoken to each other in a loud, casual tone without once mentioning what was happening. The second time, Emily had been alone. She’d left the baby with Leon and gone to buy felt for the puppets. Directly opposite their apartment building, in an arched granite doorway, a figure fell suddenly backward into the gloom of the Laundromat. She hardly saw; she was calculating the yardage she would need. But that evening, as she was making a pointed hat for Rumpelstiltskin, the memory came swimming in again. She saw the figure fall once more out of sight—though he hadn’t been wearing a pointed hat at all but something flat, a beret, perhaps. Still, where had she seen him before? She said, “Oh!” and laid her scissors down. “Guess who I think I saw today?” she said to Leon. “That doctor. That Dr. Morgan.”

“Did you ask him why he never sent a bill?”

“No, he wasn’t really … It wasn’t a meeting, exactly. I mean, he didn’t see me. Well, he saw me, but it seemed he … Probably,” she said, “it wasn’t Dr. Morgan at all. I’m sure he would have spoken.”

A month or so later he followed her along Beacon Avenue. She stopped to look in the window of an infants’-wear shop and she felt someone else stop too. She turned and found a man some distance away, his back to her, gazing off down the street at nothing in particular. He might have stepped out of a jungle movie, she thought, with his safari shirt and shorts, his knee-high socks, ankle boots, and huge pith helmet. Extraneous buckles and D-rings glittered all over him—on his shoulders, his sleeves, his rear pockets. It was nobody dangerous. It was only one of those eccentric people you often see on city streets, acting out some elaborate inner vision of themselves. She walked on. At the next red light she glanced back again and here he came, hurrying toward her with a swaggering, soldierly gait to match the uniform, his eyes obscured by the helmet but his abundant beard in full view. Oh, you couldn’t mistake that beard. Dr. Morgan! She took a step toward him. He looked up at her, clapped a hand on his helmet, and darted through a door reading LURAE’S FINE COIFFURES.

Emily felt absurd. She felt how open and glad she must look, preparing to call his name. But what had she done wrong? Why didn’t he like her any more? He had seemed so taken with the two of them, back when Gina was born.

She didn’t tell Leon. It would make him angry, maybe; you never knew. She decided that, anyhow, it had only been one of those unexplainable things-meaningless, not worth troubling Leon about.

So it got off on the wrong foot, you might say. There was a moment when they could have dealt with it straightforwardly, but the moment slipped past them. After several of these incidents (spaced across weeks or even months) in which one thing or another prevented them from going up to the man and greeting him naturally, it began to seem that the situation had taken a turn of its own. There was no way they could gracefully set it right now. It became apparent that he must be crazy—or, at least, obsessed in some unaccountable way. (Emily shivered to think of Gina’s delivery at his hands.) Yet, as Leon pointed out, he did 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.

2

Now that it was winter, business had slacked off. There had been a little burst around Christmas (holiday