Small World (5 page)

Lucy, in the photograph, flattened out and subtly miscolored by the garish inks used in the printing, seemed to herself everything that Dolly wasn’t, and most of it was negative. Her father had called her
gawmy
once; it was one of his Yankee words and meant outsized and clumsy. She felt it herself; she was
gawmy,
next to Dolly. Barefaced, big-bosomed, big-butted, a hick in jeans and a blazer, she stared up at herself from the page, as if from some funhouse mirror.

She felt a momentary surge of irritation with Nick. It was his doing. Lucy had never expected to be included in the photographic session. She and the kids were present at Nick’s invitation, to preview the exhibition on the day before the opening, a day when the Dalton Institute was normally closed to visitors. Nick had cozened her into it, exactly as he had cozened Dolly into lending her dollhouse to the Dalton’s dollhouse show. Nick was a professional cozener; Lucy couldn’t be expected to stand against him when Dolly herself had not.

Lucy passed to the next photograph, on the facing page. In it, her children admired the model White House. She knew the photograph to be an illusion. Zach and Laurie had seen the dollhouse many times, in many stages of undress, and had seen each and every element that Lucy created for it. It was not something that impressed them anymore. Yet their faces, in the picture, were animated, their eyes alight, their cheeks highly colored with excitement.

It came of their sudden and total possession of the Dalton itself: its vast spaces, the collections it housed, the staff, many of whom were friends and acquaintances, were all, this day, all theirs. They had whooped through the halls and had been initiated into the mysteries of the radio lecture system by friendly technicians. No wonder when Nick had asked them to have their picture taken with Grandmother’s dollhouse, that they had obliged with such aplomb.

Their other grandmother, Lucy’s mother, was going to love the photograph. She would buy half a dozen copies of the magazine to send to friends and relatives. ‘Look on page eleven for a surprise!’ or something like that, on an index card paperclipped to the cover. It made Lucy feel a little better about the whole thing. It would bring pleasure to her mother, to whom Lucy had given so little.

Lucy turned the page and encountered a full-page photograph of the Main Hall of the Dalton, taken from the third-floor balcony. It was from an angle that took in the clustered dollhouses of the exhibition in one marble-floored landscape, a scenic view from a turn-off over an alien valley. And Nick was in the middle of it, marking the scale of the houses against the scale of the Hall.

The photographer had apparently been as taken with the Dalton as Lucy always was. She instinctively looked up whenever she entered the Main Hall, where the Dalton climbed uninterrupted for five stories, like an inside-out wedding cake. The successive stories shrank inward as they rose, like a ziggurat, and were topped with a small glass doughnut of a room, an Edwardian version of a skywalk. From it one could look out over the Mall and see the great public buildings made a little smaller.

Or one could look down into the Main Hall, a view that was somehow more threatening to the stomach.

Once, while a little high, Nick had told her that he wanted someday to assemble a collection of prisms to refract the light that entered through the skywalk. Now, Lucy could never look up without envisioning the geysered colors splashing over the ornate balconies and columns.

The day of the opening, the day after the
VIP
photographer had taken their pictures, it had been intermittently rainy. The overcast had blotted up the light and the upper stories of the Hall had been gloomy and obscure. The chandeliers made little headway against the dank all-day dawn.

Lucy had tramped with Laurie and Zach across the soaking Mall, telling herself that three more would add to the attendance, a comfort to Nick, and admitted secretly that she had to see some public reaction. The buildings around the Mall had been made distant and not quite solid by the blowing rain. They had been as romantic as ruined temples or castles. The wet grass and mud had been slick underfoot. Now and again, the intrepid party had had their slow progress enlivened by a sudden slip forward, and a frantic, momentary jig to regain their balances.

They had encountered the dinosaur in a drift of fog. Its body had been slick and reptilian, the condensed water dripping from its face in huge, mock tears. Zach’s hand had tightened in Lucy’s a second before Laurie cried out, ‘Look!’ His steps had dragged as they passed it, and he had stared back at it in wonder as the mist reclaimed it.

The weather had not discouraged hundreds of other children and adults. The marble floors of the Dalton had been slippery and gritty with tracked-in mud. The very air had been moist. Yellow slickers had made the crowd as colorful as a field of daffodils. The excited voices of children, the authoritative voices of adults herding them, the crackling of radio wands, the insectile clicking of umbrellas closing, had made for Lucy a bright tapestry of noise.

The first voice that had spoken from the radio wands that Lucy and the children had obtained on entering was a familiar one.

‘Welcome,’ it had said—Zach shouted, ‘Nick!’—‘to the Dalton Institute’s Small Worlds’—people around them had turned to smile at the small boy bouncing up and down in his galoshes—‘an exhibition of dollhouses and their furnishings from Colonial times to the present,’ Nick’s taped voice had concluded. Laurie had rolled her eyes in free-floating embarrassment.

Holding hands, the Douglases had moved from cluster to cluster, looking at the dollhouses they had seen set up the previous day. They had not had the radio wands, then, the little telephonelike receivers that magically revealed all the secrets, though they had witnessed the testing of them by the technicians. Yesterday the illustrated folder had been their guide, and Nick, as well as Lucy, whose knowledge of the field was considerable. Her own work had been contained in half a dozen of the exhibits, but nowhere had it been as extensive as in Grandmother’s White House. Because of the distraction of the photographer and the intimidating presence of Dolly herself, they had none of them examined it in detail. This day they had, walking around it to see it from all sides.

Lucy had been relieved that Laurie and Zach had held their tongues; she had half-expected one of them to announce, ‘My mother did that!’ Perhaps it had been their grandmother’s voice, emanating from the radio wand, that awed them a little and invested the familiar bulk of the dollhouse with a little glamor.

. They had crept away through the rain after a couple of hours. Laurie and Zach had both fallen asleep in the car. The rest of the day had been washed away by the rain, as dreamlike as the dinosaur, or the buildings around the Mall.

The telephone rang, and Lucy jumped. The clock on the wall accused her. She should have been in the workshop fifteen minutes ago.

From the living room, her father declared, ‘Horseshit!’

It made Lucy smile. One of his chief pastimes was playing critic to his favorite soap.

She picked up the receiver on the second ring. She knew who it

was.

‘Are you the Lucy Douglas in
VIP
? The yummy one?’ Nick asked.

Lucy blew an emphatic raspberry into the phone, and listened to Nick laughing.

‘Some of us have to work for a living,’ she interrupted, ‘so excuse me.’

‘Wait,’ he pleaded.

‘I’m waiting, but only out of an overly trained respect for my

elders.’

‘The pictures were great,’ he rushed, ‘and you were beautiful. Are you really twenty-nine?’

‘Thanks. No, I’m fourteen, I just look old for my age. You’re in really hot water because of it too, but you deserve it. You might have warned me so I could wear something more flattering than a pair of jeans that makes my butt look as big as the FBI building.’ ‘I dunno,’ he mused, ‘I think your butt looked fine. Besides, if I’d warned you, you wouldn’t have come.’

‘You are horrifyingly devious.’

He chortled evilly. ‘Don’t forget, me proud beauty, I have your daddy’s mortgage.’

Lucy laughed. ‘See ya tonight, Snidely.’

‘You must free yourself, my dear, from this Puritanical, middle-class obsession with work.’

‘I
am
middle class and Puritanical. And I have these middle-class, Puritanical kids who have wicked appetites. You wanna feed ’em?’

There was a brief, satisfying pause from Nick.

‘Well?’ she demanded, enjoying the unexpected sensation of having backed him into a comer.

‘I’m thinking about it,’ he said. ‘They’re neat kids. I just don’t know if I could take their mother’s backchat.’

‘I learned everything I know from you.’

‘Whew. For a minute there I thought you were going to spit all over the phone again and electrocute yourself. ’

‘You’d better go play with your museum,’ Lucy insisted, ‘and let me go back to work.’

‘Too bad, I was just going to ask you to have dinner with me tonight.’

‘So ask.’ Lucy studied the clock. If Nick would ever let her get some work done, she would treat herself to a night off.

‘Eight o’clock?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Have you heard from Dolly yet?’

‘No.’

‘That’s why you’re so anxious to go back to work,’ he accused. ‘You’re too clever. You forgot Pop. He answers phones, along with his many other fine attributes.’

‘But Zach’s sleeping now. You’ll take the phone off the hook. I was surprised I got through, but I surmised you might be entranced with your own image in this glorious rag.’

Lucy laughed. ‘See ya tonight, Snidely.’

She hung up and immediately took the phone off the hook, hanging the receiver over the edge of the corkboard next to the phone.

‘Pop,’ she asked, sticking her head into the living room, ‘will you babysit tonight after eight?’

‘Course.’ He flicked one big hand in her direction. His eyes never left the screen. ‘Pure horseshit, this show, know that, Lu?’

She nodded. ‘I’ll be in the workshop, Pop.’

Nick Weiler stroked his beard and listened to the buzz of the open line for a few seconds. Unwilling to let Lucy go, he listened to her

absence.

At last he hung up and stared at the magazine, open on his desk. Lucy had been unnerved during the picture-taking with Dolly. The whole business of the publicity had surprised her and then too, she was almost always thrown onto the defensive around Dolly. In the picture with her kids, she came into her own.

The photographer had caught the curious upward slant of her eyes over her cheekbones, which were not the hollow, starved bones of the fashion model, but were fully fleshed and modeled, as if sculpted in some fine-grained bleached wood. The Tartar in her, she explained away her eyes and facial structure, joking away both her ancestry and her temperament.

And then he thought of her hands, with their calluses that were like thin bark, as if she were still caught somewhere in some mythic metamorphosis, still barely Galatea, or just becoming Daphne. But the very center of her palms and between her fingers, at the bases, the skin was smooth and silky.

When the phone buzzed once and one of the numbers lit up, he reluctantly put his thoughts of Lucy away and picked it up.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s Mrs. Douglas, Dr. Weiler.’

Not Lucy, he told himself, suddenly irritated with himself for wanting her to call him back, for being disappointed because he knew it wasn’t Lucy, it was Dolly, or he would shave his beard.

‘Thank you, Roseann.’ He heard the click of the button being released by Roseann. ‘Hello, Dorothy.’

‘Have you seen that goddamn magazine?’

‘Ummm. ’ She was going to rant. He would shut up and wait out the storm.

‘I’ll never have anything to do with those bastards again.’

‘You shouldn’t take it to heart,’ he ventured, without any hope that she was listening.

A purple curse was loosed on his left ear, followed by ‘Would you like to be called Nickie, or whatever obnoxious nickname

your family tagged you with when you were too young to defend yourself?’

‘Nickles,’ he said absently. ‘Mother always called me Nickles.’ Dolly’s low-throated explosive laugh rolled over the line. ‘Nickles?’ she demanded.

‘Until I went away to school.’

Dolly paused. ‘Well, your mother always was a bubblehead.’ Nick struggled momentarily between the son’s instinctive defense of his mother and the grown man’s knowledge that his mother was, at the most difficult times, a bubblehead. Mother love won out.

‘She loved me,’ he protested.

Dolly fell silent. Her father had given her her nickname;
her
mother had always called her Dorothy, or Dorothy Ann. And Nick Weiler knew all that, knew that she hated people calling her Dolly because it was her father’s name for her, a love name. Hers. And old Mike’s.

‘Anyway,’ she said petulantly, ‘I’m sorry I lent you my dollhouse. I can’t wait to get it back. I miss it.’

‘You’re welcome to visit it anytime.’

‘Maybe I will.’