The Sundial (23 page)

“I’ll show you,” Aunt Fanny said mysteriously; she had no idea of why she was suddenly so anxious to show Fancy the big room upstairs, but told herself vaguely that it was a kind of continuity, a way of establishing one strong direct line from the first Mrs. Halloran to Fancy; “It’s my doll house,” Aunt Fanny said happily, and opened the door with a flourish, as though she were her mother welcoming a guest.

“What
is
it?” Fancy asked, peering from the doorway.

“My mother’s house,” Aunt Fanny said. “Where your grandfather and I were born.”

“It’s funny,” Fancy said.

“Funny?”

“Strange,” Fancy said hastily. “A big doll house, but no dolls.”

“The dolls are here,” Aunt Fanny said. “I remember them. My mother sat here,” she said, sitting down on the blue upholstered chair. “Sit on the footstool, Fancy; that other big chair was my father’s. I am the mother, wearing a yellow dress. You must be me, little Frances. We will pretend that little Richard is in the other room, studying his lessons.”

“Can I touch anything?” Fancy asked, turning uncomfortably on the footstool.

“Little Frances is not allowed to touch things in this room. When Richard has finished his lessons you may go into the other room and play with your toys. My father is sitting there in his chair and he is studying too, one of his important books. He has a pencil to underline anything that he thinks might be useful for him to remember. I am my mother and I am always thinking about my darling children. The dinner dishes have been washed and perhaps later your father will put a record on the victrola.”

“I want to play with the toys now.”

“Later, dear. We are a very happy family and we love each other dearly. Don’t we?”

“I guess so,” Fancy said uncertainly.

“We love each other very
very
dearly. We are always thinking of ways to make each other happy, aren’t we? Right now your father is working hard because he is dreaming of someday taking his family to live in a lovely house he will build for them, and I am your mother and I am thinking of how strong and happy and handsome my children are. Aren’t I always thinking of you?”

“I guess so.”

“My darling little Frances will grow up to be a lovely woman, tall and fair, and someday she will find a man who is as good as her father, and she will marry him and they will have strong and happy and handsome children of their own. But my son Richard will never marry; he will stay with his mother always, standing by his father, so I will always have a strong wise man on either side of me—”

Fancy stood up. “I think I hear my mother calling me,” she said, moving toward the door.

Aunt Fanny looked at her mournfully. “Do you know that they are dead now?” she asked. “They were your great grandparents.”

“Yes, Aunt Fanny. May I go now?”

“Run along, Frances,” Aunt Fanny said remotely. When the door closed behind Fancy she sat quietly in her mother’s chair, wondering at the quiet in her mother’s rooms. When she closed the door behind her at last, and locked it, she thought: someday someone will come again, and wonder who lived here.

_____

“Here comes Aunt Fanny now,” said Mrs. Willow as Aunt Fanny came down the great stairway, “Aunt Fanny, come and decide something for us. We can’t make up our minds about breakfast that first morning—would you think ham and eggs?”

_____

“No,” Fancy said, as though continuing a conversation begun long before, “I’m the one with the worst problems. You’ve been lucky.”

“So have you.” Gloria took up a little doll from the doll house and examined him curiously. “You’ve always lived
here
, for one thing.”

“People growing up . . .” Fancy’s voice faded; she seemed to be trying very hard to phrase something only very imperfectly perceived; she laughed timidly, and reached out to touch Gloria’s arm. “It’s
easier
, being young and growing up,” she said haltingly, “when there are other people around doing it
with
you.
You
know, when you can think that all over the world there are children your age, growing up, and all of them somehow
feeling
the same. But suppose . . . suppose you were the
only
child growing up.” She shook her head. “You were lucky,” she said.

“I haven’t altogether grown up yet.”

“Gloria, won’t you miss things like dancing, and boys, and going to parties, and pretty dresses, and movies, and football games? I’ve been waiting a long time for all the things like that, and now . . .”

“I can only think we’ll have other things as good. Anyway, we’ll be safe.”

“Who wants to be
safe
, for heaven’s sakes?” Fancy was scornful. “I’d rather live in a world full of other people, even dangerous people. I’ve been
safe
all my life. I’ve never even played with anyone, except my dolls.” Once again she was thoughtful, moving her hand along the corner of the doll house in a gesture oddly reminiscent of her grandmother. “If I could,” she said at last, “I would make it stop, all of this.”

“Maybe they all feel the same way, really,” Gloria said; she too, speaking of something not quite understood, spoke awkwardly. “I think they want the same things you do, only you would . . . inherit them, so to speak, just by growing up. Things like excitement, and new experiences, and all kinds of strange and wonderful things happening; you get them anyway, just by the process of growing older, but for them . . . they’ve already outgrown all they know and they want to try it all over again. Even at
my
age, you keep thinking you’ve missed so much, and you get older all the time.”

“But what is there left that people like Aunt Fanny and Mrs. Willow are waiting for? What do they think can possibly happen nice to them
now?
”

“I can’t answer
all
your questions, silly. I don’t know myself. All I know is that being safe is more important than anything else.”

“No,” Fancy said. “No, it can’t be.”

“I’m only seventeen years old,” Gloria said, “and I know this much—the world out there, Fancy, that world which is all around on the other side of the wall, it isn’t real. It’s real inside here,
we
’re real, but what is outside is like it’s made of cardboard, or plastic, or something.
Nothing
out there is real. Everything is made out of something else, and everything is made to look like something else, and it all comes apart in your hands. The people aren’t real, they’re nothing but endless copies of each other, all looking just alike, like paper dolls, and they live in houses full of artificial things and eat imitation food—”

“My doll house,” Fancy said, amused.

“Your dolls have little cakes and roasts made of wood and painted. Well, the people out there have cakes and bread and cookies made out of pretend flour, with all kinds of things taken out of it to make it prettier for them to eat, and all kinds of things put in to make it easier for them to eat, and they eat meat which has been cooked for them already so they won’t have to bother to do anything except heat it up and they read newspapers full of nonsense and lies and one day they hear that some truth is being kept from them for their own good and the next day they hear that the truth is being kept from them because it was really a lie and the next day they hear—”

Fancy laughed. “You sound like you hate everything.”

“I wouldn’t like being a doll in a doll house, I can tell you. I’m only seventeen years old, but I’ve learned a lot. All those people out there know about things like love and tenderness is what they hear in songs or read in books—that’s one reason I’m glad we burned all the books
here
. People shouldn’t be able to read them and remember nothing but lies. And you talk about dances and parties—I can tell you there’s no heart to anything any more; when you dance with a boy he’s only looking over your shoulder at some other boy, and the only real people left any more are the shadows on the television screens.”

“If I believed you,” Fancy said, “I would still mind never trying things for myself. But I won’t ever believe you until I’ve gone out there and seen it.”

“There’s nothing there,” Gloria said with finality. “It’s a make-believe world, with nothing in it but cardboard and trouble.” She thought for a minute, and then said, “If you were a liar, or a pervert, or a thief, or even just sick, there wouldn’t be anything out there you couldn’t have.”

Fancy bent over the doll house. “Anyway,” she said, “I don’t care how shabby it is. I’m not afraid of bad people, and of not being safe.”

“But there aren’t any
good
people,” Gloria said helplessly. “No one is
any
thing but tired and ugly and mean. I
know
.”

_____

The first Mr. Halloran had been accustomed to chart and direct his busy life with suitable maxims; “The more haste, the less speed,” he was fond of remarking, “There’s always room at the top; you can’t take it with you.” His battery of architects and landscape technicians had declined, as one man, to adorn Mr. Halloran’s home with elaborately painted and carved and engraved statements that Mr. Halloran could not take it with him, but had in many cases compromised with Mr. Halloran’s passion for the reassuring presence of a line of good advice. Mr. Halloran—who kept on his desk a framed copy of Kipling’s “If”—felt that every human soul was the better for the nudging presence of sound words, and it was only the tactful intervention of a young man—the nephew of the principal architect, in fact—who had taken a master’s degree in English literature at Columbia University, that prevented a final rupture between Mr. Halloran and the principal architect, the one declaring that he would go to his death rather than see a wall of his creation scribbled over with things like “A man is always the better for a friend,” and the other, with a tenaciousness basic to his personality, stubbornly leafing through a volume of familiar quotations and asking whose money was paying for this house? The young fellow, who had taken a master’s degree in English literature at Columbia University, had suggested that Mr. Halloran could have his maxims without doing extreme violence to the feelings of the architect, by favoring a more learned and poetic use of words; in any case, the student pointed out, the difference of meaning and intention between one maxim and another was almost non-existent, and there was no more vital change in conduct suggested by “You can’t take it with you” than “When shall we live if not now?”

Thus the gilded and elegantly presented suggestions on many of the walls of Mr. Halloran’s house; ineffectual, certainly—in spite of the framed copy of Kipling’s “If,” Mr. Halloran continued all his days to accumulate nothing except money—but to the people living in the big house it had become a matter of indifference that they dined, exhorted to “Let none save good companions grace this festive board” or slept, assured “Get up, get up for shame, the blooming morn Upon her wings presents the god unshorn,” or even “Hated by fools, and fools to hate, Be that my motto and my fate,” or mounted the stairs reading, “When shall we live if not now?”

When the student, carried away in a kind of Strawberry Hill intoxication, suggested that Mr. Halloran cause a grotto to be constructed on the grounds of the big house, Mr. Halloran’s first anxiety—before even making any definite attempt to determine what a grotto might be, or might be for, or might require in the way of furnishings, since if it existed he meant to have it—was to ensure that proper and suitable mottos would be charmingly placed upon its walls. Mr. Halloran’s dim notion of a grotto held that a grotto was enticingly cool in the oppressive warm weather, and his determination upon a grotto-motto followed eagerly; “Fear no more the heat of the sun,” the grotto was to say in some manner, and upon this Mr. Halloran was firm.

The student maintained, maligning Horry Walpole mercilessly, that a grotto was no grotto at all unless it overlooked a lake, and Mr. Halloran, who had already an ornamental pool on the garden front of his house, set his builders doggedly to work to construct a lake at the far end of the grounds; at two points, in fact, it touched the wall. The grotto was built of rock near the lake, earth heaped over it, and grass and flowers trained to grow on top in sweet wild profusion, and on the rock wall of the grotto inside was written, in letters of blue touched with gilt, “Fear no more the heat of the sun.” The entire air of the grotto was faintly that of a Strawberry Hill confection, and it would have been vastly improved by the presence of a party of ladies, resting there after their saunter through the shrubbery (“La, what a love of a wilderness we have covered,” the air just breathed; “hark; are the gentlemen back from their riding?”); or at the very least a dainty repast of fruits and ices, with vine leaves for plates and the entire chorus from the King’s Theatre to float, fairylike and singing, in pleasure boats over the small waves.

Perhaps not all of this was apparent to Mr. Halloran. He did not care for his grotto, after all, because it was damp, and the lake was an irritation to him, reminding him always of how messy it had been to construct, and he had never been able to bring his wife there and write her name among the rocks. Worst of all, after the swans which originally swam in the ornamental pool had bitten young Richard and two housemaids they were sent to endure a lonely disgrace on the grotto-lake, where they bred and quarrelled, and were an unending annoyance and menace to the gardeners.

As a child, Aunt Fanny, who had wandered unceasingly and with deep incoherent love over every part of the grounds enclosed by the wall, had spent some amount of time in the grotto, watching the water of the lake move under the soft wind, hiding from the swans, and catching any number of head-colds. Now, older and more susceptible to influenzas and grippes, she came to the grotto less often, and yet every now and then she was irresistibly moved to walk in that direction. During the later days of July, in fact, Aunt Fanny made a kind of pilgrimage to all of her favorite haunts, to admire once more her father’s handiwork and hope, somehow, to engrave upon her memory the well-loved spots which were so soon to dissolve utterly.