Small World (6 page)

Nick felt suddenly cheerful, off the treacherous territory of Dolly’s name. ‘It’s drawing a lot of attention. We’ve never had such a successful show.’

•Really?’ Dolly was pleased.

‘Really,’ he assured her.

‘You are taking good care of it, aren’t you? The papers are full of art thefts. It’s very upsetting.’

‘Dolly,’ Nick told her solemnly, ‘you’re the only person I know who’d steal a dollhouse.’

She laughed.

‘Better than stealing the dollhouse maker,’ she said.

‘Can’t steal what isn’t owned,’ Nick came back lightly. He would like to tell her off. She ought to know better than to pick at him about Lucy. But nothing would be gained by letting his anger show.

‘I may not own her, but apparently I’m the way to making her, in more than one sense,’ Dolly said tartly.

‘My, aren’t we funny?’

‘Very funny,’ Dolly agreed. ‘What sort of fool do you think I am? You arranged that picture-taking session. I’m perfectly aware that you used me to promote not only your Christly

museum, but Lucy as well. Thanks to me, and you, of course, she’s got a bundle of free advertising and an instant reputation as the best dollhouse decorator in the country.’

‘Are you suggesting she isn’t?’

‘Don’t be silly/ Dolly dismissed the question. ‘She’s working for me, isn’t she?’

‘Oh, I thought maybe you were doing it to help support your grandchildren,’ he barbed.

‘That too.’ She ignored or never sensed his sarcastic attack. ‘Anyway you owe me for the dollhouse, darling. You be nice to Lucy. I know she’s nice to you. She can be a perfect bitch, but you can handle a little bitchiness, and she
does
need a man. I’ve never expected her to live her life as some kind of virginal memorial to Harrison.’

‘I’m so pleased to be of service.’

‘Lovely of you, darling. I’ll be talking to you soon. Take care of my precious.’

Meaning the dollhouse, of course, not Lucy, not Laurie or Zach. Nick found he was grinding his teeth. Condescending, miserable . . . it was Lucy who had drawn her mother-in-law into miniatures when Dolly was bereft, it was Lucy’s work, at whatever price Dolly had paid for it, that was bringing in the crowds in the Small Worlds exhibition. It made him a little sick to his stomach, remembering that once he had known Dolly Hardesty’s hard little body, even as he knew Lucy now.

There was the matter of his Christly museum, as she had called it, which needed running, and her goddamn dollhouse to look after. There was a meeting on security later in the afternoon. He had no time to be angry with Dolly or to muse on Lucy. He tossed the magazine to one side and opened the thick file on museum security.

At midafternoon he was walking through the exhibition in the Main Hall. He was one of a dozen or so people in the place who had attained a height of more than four feet, and in the presence of two hundred plus schoolchildren and all the miniature houses, he felt like Gulliver in Lilliput.

He visited the exhibitions frequently. He liked to pick up random responses from the visiting public, but it was as much because he enjoyed the looking as anything else. The commentary of the children and their escorts came to him as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, or more correctly, the pieces of two jigsaw puzzles, as the lectures spilled from the radio wands as well.

The lilting voice of Connie Winslow, his assistant for special events, caught his ear. ‘ . . . built in 1876, it features drawers in its base for storage. . . . ’

‘Brian, don’t touch.’ The strident voice of a harried schoolteacher.

A boy with an eye for a scale. ‘ ... the doll’s too big for the furniture.’

‘No, it was made that way.’ His adult escort.

He doesn’t give up. ‘It’s still too big . . . ’

‘ . . . the Aubusson rug in the drawing room was worked by Elizabeth . . . ’ a staffer’s voice, from a radio wand, one of the girls in the restoring office, he thought.

‘ . . . wish I had that dollhouse . . . ’ a wistful child.

‘ . . . the extremely narrow hallways. Severely damaged in a fire . . . ’ Eddie Bouton, his public information officer.

‘ . . . oooh, look at the little chamberpot. I couldn’t get my smallest fingertip into it!’ A tall young girl, with the gawky look of preadolescence.

‘ . . . typical Victorian cabinet dollhouse divided into two floors of two rooms each . . . ’Connie again. Nick had persuaded Connie and several other staffers, with good public-speaking voices to tape the scripted information. It involved them more deeply in this specific exhibition, exposed them to other areas of the museum’s work, outside their narrow specialties, and saved the cost of professional readers, a satisfying arrangement all round.

‘ . . . made a lamp like that once from a coffee creamer from Sambo’s,’ one middle-aged lady related to another. They would have dollhouses of their own, beloved hobbyists.

‘Really?’ a squeal of delight.

‘ . . . the first tin dollhouses . . . ’ Eddie Bouton, in concert with his own voice, from two radio wands at once, ‘ . . . created by cabinet maker Joseph Pinkham in Philadelphia in 1830 . . . ’

‘ . . . it’s just like my Aunt Theresa’s dollhouse, the one with the elevator that really works, you know, when you pull the string . . . ’ a pair of little girls, twittering.

He could not escape himself today. ‘ . . . the bow windows in the doors are a unique and unusual feature . . . ’ he heard himself saying.

‘ . . . want to do curtains like that if I can get the fabric . . . ’ another hobbyist, a collector.

‘Brian, don’t touch.’ Boy at work, being supervised.

‘ . . . needlework is exquisite, isn’t it? It’s all the same woman’s work. L. Douglas, it says here. I’m sure Harriet Mushrow’s bedroom set was done by her, the one with the log cabin quilt . . . ’ The subject of the collectors’ conversation drew him back.

‘Miss Porteous, does the White House really look like this? I went there last month and I don’t remember it this way,’ asked an observant child, near Dolly’s White House.

‘Not exactly. What does the folder say?’ The teacher.

‘ . . . geez, I wish I was the president’s daughter and somebody gave me a dollhouse . . . ’ A chubby girl with a pouting lip.

‘ ... the 1948 to 1952 restoration was marked with a gift from King George VI, presented by the then Princess Elizabeth. It was an early eighteenth-century mirror, here copied . . . ’

You tell ’em, Dolly,
Nick thought as he passed within hearing of her recorded lecture.

He bent to tap a small boy on the shoulder. ‘Brian,’ he said, ‘touch that,’ pointing to a large Victorian cabinet dollhouse with oversize windows, the better to peep through, and furnished with relentlessly sturdy pieces. Brian grinned and bee-lined for the dollhouse. Nick caught Brian’s teacher’s relieved eye, nodded, and made for his security conference.

Lucy’s father opened the door to Nick’s knock.

‘Hello, Mr. Novick,’ Nick said, shaking the older man’s hand. ‘Come on in,’ he was greeted. ‘She’s still getting rigged out. Be right down.’

He followed him into the living room where Laurie and Zach were watching television.

‘Set down,’ Mr. Novick invited him.

‘Okay.’ He sat down on the arm of the sofa. ‘Laurie needs a good tickling, doesn’t she?’

Lucy’s father snorted amiably and said, ‘I guess.’

Nick reached casually for the seven-year-old, who wriggled away from him, giggling, while trying to keep her eyes on the TV screen. Zach spared a glance long enough to grin at them, and then turned back to his study of Snoopy’s ongoing angst.

During the next commercial break, Zach climbed wordlessly into Nick’s lap. and sat there, poised as nervelessly as the top man on the circus pyramid, with one thumb in his mouth, and the other hand working the gap in his pajama bottoms. Nick moved his left arm to support the boy. Laurie glanced up and tickled Nick’s leg to get his attention. He followed her gaze to Zach’s hand and they grinned at each other.

Lucy found them arranged in comfortable wordlessness before the TV. She removed Zach from Nick’s lap and deposited him next to Laurie on the sofa. Laurie’s arm slipped under the little boy’s head in a motherly gesture. Lucy kissed the tops of their heads.

‘After Snoopy, it’s bedtime,’ she said to her father. ‘Night, Pop.’

‘Did you write down the number for Pop?’ she asked Nick, and he paused to jot the telephone number of the restaurant on a piece of paper.

Mr. Novick followed them to the door. ‘Have a good time,’ he boomed.

‘How is your father?’ Nick asked Lucy, when the door had closed behind them and they were walking to the car.

‘Well enough, I guess. He had words with my mother tonight, right after supper. She’d seen the magazine; she called about that.’

‘I didn’t know they were on speaking terms.’

‘There’s not much to talk about anymore. The kids.’ Lucy laughed. ‘Most of their conversation tonight ran to my father hinting that Mother is missing her grandchildren, to whom he happens to be very close, heh, heh, and her suggesting that he’s imposing on me at the very least, and probably drinking my cooking sherry behind my back, too.’

‘She liked the
VIP
piece?’

‘More or less. The kid’s picture, anyway. She said she thought you—'

‘Oh, oh.’

‘—you looked distinguished but older than she’d expected. Then she sniffled a bit and allowed I wasn’t her baby anymore.’

‘Oh.’ Nick couldn’t see her expression. She had found something to stare at out the window. ‘No,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I guess you’re not, are you?’

Lucy didn’t answer. She apparently didn’t want to pursue the subject. Nick wished she would open up to him but she held her past to herself tightly. He knew that her parents had divorced when she was in her early teens and that she had never quite recovered from feeling that she was an embarrassing leftover, the one real barrier to a permanent erasure of the disastrous marriage for both of them. Her mother had remarried and had younger

children; she led a busy suburban life around her teaching career and her second family. There seemed to be little energy left over for more than a superficial relationship with her grown-up, widowed daughter.

Nick stole a glance at Lucy as they paused for a stop light. She had her hair up, in the elaborate quasi-Oriental style just coming into fashion. It brought out the barbaric structure of her bones, inviting touch the way a smooth-polished curve of wood did. ‘You’re beautiful tonight.’

She looked at him gravely. ‘Thank you. You’re very . . . ‘Distinguished?’

She laughed with him.

‘Did Dolly call?’ she asked him.

‘Oh, yes. Between your electric raspberry and the endless meeting on security.’

‘She called me, too.’

‘And what did she say and what did you say?’

‘I said as little as I could. I made sympathetic noises about the sacrilege the magazine committed. Apparently the editors were quite cruel about it when she upbraided them.’

Nick snorted.

‘She wanted to know how her litle darlings were. Weren’t they just adorable in that photograph, peeking at Grandmother’s dollhouse?’ Lucy mocked. ‘I almost threw up.’

‘Don’t you worry about them taking after her?’

Lucy smiled thinly. ‘I examined them closely in the cradle. If I’d seen the slightest resemblance, I’d have strangled them, right then, with my bare hands. Which, by the way, she told me were obscene, very distracting in the photographs.’

‘She must have been a wonderful mother-in-law?’

‘Yes. I’ve earned my heavenly crown. We always lived on military bases. We didn’t have the money to visit her, and she wouldn’t visit us. The housing was tacky; it offended her. Anyway, I told her Zach was putting gesso on his toothbrush and hung up, before she could lecture me on leaving the stuff where he could reach it.’

‘I didn’t know you ever lied.’

‘I don’t. He was.’

‘Yuck. It isn’t poisonous, is it?’

‘I don’t think so. Not really nutritious, you know?’

‘My little talk with Dolly was fun, too.’

‘Really?’ Lucy smothered a giggle. ‘Tell all.’

‘The dear sweet thing accused me of using her name and fame,
and
her dollhouse. to promote you, me, and the Dalton.’

‘Did she?’

‘Oh, yes. And got in one particularly cheap shot about—’

‘I can guess. Shit.’ Lucy’s voice faded. ‘How long have you known Dolly, Nick?’

‘Since we were kids. My father painted her picture once.’

‘I remember. That’s the painting that was stolen a little while ago.’

‘The next summer, I think it was, after her father was ejected from office, Dolly and her mother spent some time in England. Her mother used the connection with Sartoris to introduce herself to my mother. Mother’s the original marshmallow, you know. There’s no meanness in her; she doesn’t see it in other people. I suppose that goes a long way to explaining not only how she could love Sartoris, who’s a right old bastard in a lot of ways, and why my stepfather loved her.