Small World (4 page)

Suddenly the old man came to himself again, startled to find he was mildly tumescent. He laughed crudely, as if at some dirty joke, but he knew it was on himself. And he wished deeply he had someone to share it with. Not Ethelyn Blood, who had come to live with him on the island the winter after he had painted the little bitch, nor Nick, who was so often in his thoughts these days. It was Maggie he wanted to share it with, just this moment, and she
would
laugh. Nobody laughed like Maggie.

He would find out if she were still alive and call her up. He must have her married name written down somewhere, the one he had never—probably for much too obvious reasons—been able to remember, and the telephone number.

But no, he wouldn’t call Maggie Jeffries. That was history and he was done with that; he hadn’t any more time for history, for sitting around, mucking about in the long dead and gone. Nostalgia, a contemptible emotion; memory, so much dead skin, vestigial emotion. It wasn’t something he had the energy for anymore.

There were too many possibilities to be realized in the way the sun struck that glass bit. The light on the sand. The light.

. . . The only heir to Sartoris’s considerable pile is Nicholas Weiler, the director of the Dalton Institute in Washington, D.C., who, though he uses the last name he was legally bom under, is Sartoris’s natural son by English socialite Maggie Jeffries Weiler.

Lady Eugenie Walters, known as Pinkie to her pals, reports in her memoirs of the period that her dear friend Maggie Jeffries never really loved anyone else but Sartoris. She continued her affair with him after her marriage to Lord Weiler, apparently with her husband’s consent. Still, it was a surprise when she had the baby that Sartoris promptly acknowledged as his own. She was forty-two at the time, and the affair had settled into a comfortable and occasional convenience. ‘Pinkie’ says the irrepressible Maggie never could resist a chance to shock; it was not her having Sartoris’s baby, or her husband’s bemused acceptance of the fact, but Maggie’s calm statement that Sartoris was a bloody liar; the child was her husband’s that scandalized. It was only after Lord Weiler's death in 1964 that she dropped the pretense. ‘Pinkie’ suggests the farce was Maggie’s curious way of apologizing to her much put-upon husband. . . .

2.22.80    —
VIPersonalities, VIP

Maggie Weiler, who hadn’t used the name Jeffries in half a century, laughed so hard she lost her grip on the
News of the World,
and dropped it into the marmalade. Her nurse, Connie, wiped it off with a napkin and gave it back to her when she’d caught her breath.

‘Oh, I am sorry, my dear,’ she wheezed, seeing the mild reproach behind Connie’s thick lenses. ‘The things that go on.’ Connie could never really be angry with Lady Maggie. She laughed over the newspaper nearly every day. It had shocked Connie once upon a time before she knew how really good Lady Maggie was, so good it made her think those old scandals must be just wicked lies, but now she defended the old lady to herself,

reflecting that one might as well laugh as cry.

‘The things that go on,’ Lady Maggie repeated emphatically.

‘Please God, none of your friends has died?’ Connie asked. It did seem Lady Maggie laughed harder over her friends’ obituaries than anything else.

Lady Maggie threw up her hands to screech with delight. The newspaper flew into the coddled egg. Connie, vaguely discomfitted at having said something unintentionally witty, summoned up an uncertain smile. She hoped, may the Blessed Virgin intercede for her, that Lady Maggie wasn’t off to a difficult day.

Captain Morrisey wasn’t supposed to have the car out. He’d promised his wife to use it only for car shows, parades, and on the ranch, at low speeds. She didn’t understand, being a woman, that a machine like this one needed a run now and then. So when she went to Ventura to see her sister in the hospital, he slipped the Villerosi out of its bay in the garage and headed for the freeway, in the opposite direction from Ventura.

He went a good hundred miles, a satisfying run, with just one stop by a cop, who had really only wanted to admire the car. He let the Captain off with a warning and a grin. And kept his grin when the Captain gunned the Villerosi up to ninety right in front of him. The cop probably realized that a man who could own and drive the likes of a 1949 Villerosi wasn’t one of those punk kids in their souped-up Camaros, looking for an accident to happen.

The Villerosi was thirsty after a while, and so was Captain Morrisey. He left the freeway to gas up at a big trucking terminal. There was a small bar on the far side from the pumps, evidently catering to the truckers. The Captain parked the sportscar next to a blue van outside the little bar. Considering the time of day the place was fairly lively; the parking lot was nearly full of pickup trucks, vans, and jeeps, but perhaps some were spillovers from the busy shopping center next door.

He settled gratefully onto the cool vinyl cushion of a bar stool and sucked up a pair of Guinnesses. The bartender was obviously unhappy about serving warm beer, let alone warm
foreign
beer, and looked suspiciously at the Captain’s canary-yellow trousers and Bally boots. Captain Morrisey had not arrived at his station in life by attending to the stares of the unwashed and unsuccessful. He enjoyed his beer, and also the smoke and noise, the masculine ambiance of the place, subtly enriched by the silence that signified the absence of his wife, bless her. When he came out into the sunshine twenty minutes later and stretched all over, he felt positively sybaritic. He strode confidently to the blue van on the far side of which he had parked the Villerosi.

He stood puzzled for a few seconds.
It wasn’t there.
A vague panic formed like a knot in his stomach. Guardedly, trying to appear casual, he glanced over the parking lot. It
was
the same blue van. He remembered very clearly the lettering on the side:
Jim Owen!Caretaker.
No, he was sufe he’d left it here. There was a fleeting half-second of relief; his memory wasn’t slipping. And then it came to him that if he hadn’t forgotten exactly where he’d parked it, there was only one explanation.

Captain Morrisey, the color drained from his face, stood staring at the place where it should be—where a long, low bullet-shaped pink projectile, a winner of the Targa Miglia and the Targa Firenze, the car driven by the holder of a world speed record for seven months, should be—and saw only the fading white lines on the black hottop, oil stains, dirt, a wad of dirty, deformed bubble gum, a crumpled cigarette pack.

Cold sweat began to bead his forehead, stain the armpits of his shirt. The Guinness in his stomach roiled and surged. For twenty-five years, he had flown planes, seventeen years in wide-bodied jets. This was how it felt when one of the goddamn wheels wouldn’t come down, or when a tire blew on the runway and scared the shit out of everybody. This was how it felt when you hit a monster air pocket and had passengers screaming and pissing themselves as tons of metal plunged to the next floor. He told himself it wasn’t as bad as losing the battle for the runway, going into a hundred and fifty mile an hour skid and not coming out of it. Or not finding that next solid floor of good air. Those things had never happened to him, but he thought about them sometimes, in the hotel rooms that were like a chain of paper dolls, and sometimes when he was in the middle of the physicals the company liked to spring on him at what seemed like weekly intervals. No, it wasn’t
that
bad.

But someone
had
stolen his Villerosi. His beautiful classic racing car. Maureen would kill him. Just kill him. He reeled against the van.

‘It could be worse,’ he muttered, unaware he was speaking out loud.

Something inside him snapped like a rubber band.
O my suffering jesus
he thought, and puked warm Guinness down the length of his yellow trousers, over the glossy shine of his Bally boots.

‘Lucy!’ Pop shouted. ‘Lucy!’

Then he was in the doorway. The sun behind him turned him into a big black scarecrow, brandishing a chunk of wood at her. Lucy pushed up her protective goggles into her hair and turned off her drill.

The workshop was suddenly quiet, the loudest sound her father’s panting breath. The air that Lucy breathed in was hot and dusty, perfumed with wood and oil. Despite the overhead lights and the open skylight above her workbench, it was darker here than outside, where the spring sun fiercely washed out everything. Stepping inside, beyond the backlight of the sun, her father became himself again. He was grinning, excited, thrusting the stick he carried at her. It flopped open in his hands and became a magazine. Her hands were suddenly sweaty. She wiped them on her overalls.

‘Finally come,’ he said, a weight of satisfaction in his voice.

She looked from the magazine in his hands to his face. His unnaturally white teeth gleamed at her. Reluctantly, she accepted the magazine. Her father waited expectantly as she studied the cover.

It was the north side of the White House, a view as familiar to most Americans as their own mother’s face. It had been photographed very cleverly, from the same plane as the model of the grounds in which it stood. The crudity of the artificial shrubbery and lawns, the plastic limo in the drive, shouted illusion. Yet it looked the real thing, almost as if someone had pasted a photograph of the real White House onto a false background. But where the sky should be, a band of red-backed black letters declared
VIP.
And about where the Washington Monument should be, another block of letters, smaller and in script, announced
Dolly’s White House.

Lucy’s stomach felt as if she were in an elevator, going down. It wanted to stay right where it was, but it had to follow the rest of her, however unwillingly.

She handed the magazine back to her father. ‘I ought to be going after Zach.’

‘Oh, it’s early yet.’ He stood twisting the magazine into a roll, puzzled at her apparent lack of excitement.

‘I want to wash my hands and take off these overalls. Why don’t you put on the soup while I’m gone?’

He nodded. ‘Don’t you want to read the story?’

‘You read it first. I’ll look at it after lunch.’

‘Well,’ he smiled, ‘I guess that’s okay.’

‘Anything else in the mail?’ Lucy shifted tools and fragile items to a high shelf beyond Zach’s reach.

‘An order from Mrs. Ashkenazy. Accessories for her parlor suite. I’ll put it on the order board this afternoon and confirm it. Rest was all bills and junk.’

She smiled wearily. ‘Thanks, Pop. See you in twenty minutes.’ Lucy left the workshop before her father. She knew he would look over her work; he wouldn’t do it while she was there. And then he would put the soup on and sit down to read the story in the magazine. He had his father’s pride. He was patently more eager to look it over than she was. She felt a small thin tide of resentment. It wasn’t his ass on the line, not his work, only his daughter’s. It wasn’t his risk.

She closed her eyes as she leaned against the basin.
Go away, bitchiness
she wished, washing her hands. It was the goddamn magazine, throwing her off balance. Picking at her poor father was just a symptom, the ghost of her adolescent anger at him leaking out of its lead casket just when she thought it was finally rotted away.

It was Lucy’s job to clear the dishes and refrigerate the leftover soup. Her father, hunched over the kitchen table with his coffee and the magazine, would do the dirty dishes later in the afternoon. ‘Don’t you want to sit down and look at this now?’

Lucy dried her hands and sat down, cocking her head to listen for Zach and hearing nothing. Sleep had evidently claimed him. ‘All done with it?’

‘Nothing else in it worth looking at.’ He pushed the magazine across the table to her and looked at his wrist watch. ‘Anyway, it’s time for that goddamn stupid show. I need all the chuckles I can get. Excuse me.’

Standing up, he scooped up his coffee cup in one thick-fingered, misshapen hand.

Lucy pulled the magazine before her and stared down at it,

grinning. She heard the click of the on button and the static as the picture emerged on the screen. The springs of the sofa gave way noisily as her father sat down.

She studied the magazine’s cover again briefly and then turned to the feature story. It was like looking at her high school yearbook. She wanted to turn the pages quickly and pretend that she wasn’t there.

The largest photograph showed the model White House with the north wall removed, to expose the furnishings and decoration of the rooms. From one side, Lucy bent toward the dollhouse, pointing out a mantelpiece in the Green Room. She didn’t need the caption to tell her it was a model of the original Monroe Empire mantel. She knew it in her hands, the hands that had made that tiny reproduction.

The photograph clearly showed her broken nails and calluses. She suppressed a blush; it was a minor price to pay for doing the work she enjoyed. Her mother-in-law would have something cutting to say about it.
Her
nails were perfect, always; her small hands unblemished, soft, and sweet-smelling.

Dolly Hardesty Douglas stood on the other side of the dollhouse. She looked like a little queen, crowned with her own silver hair. She was delicate, but ramrod straight, in white linen with lines sharp enough to cut, like the edge of good paper. Lucy was mildly amused; Dolly would be furious at the front-cover pun on her hated nickname. Her mother-in-law demanded that she be called Dorothy; Lucy did, to her face, but like nearly everyone else who knew Dolly Hardesty, slipped back into the usage of the nickname as soon as she was out of hearing. No doubt, Dolly was ripping the editors of
VIP
up one side and down the other right this second. Better them than me, Lucy thought.