Small World (8 page)

‘Dollhouses,’ she repeated. ‘The miniature houses range from goose eggs lined with foil and furnished with paperclip dolls and bead furniture to Victorian cabinet dollhouses to mass-produced plastic and tin cottages to extravagant adult toys worth thousands of dollars.’ The minicam’s eye flitted from one to another of the dollhouses as she spoke and managed as it roved to illustrate her speech, and catch, casually, here a senator or a senator’s lady, there the briefest glimpse of the president, his mother on his arm, here a high court justice, a ‘cabinet officer, a grizzled congresswoman, there a trio of prepubescent girls, turned out in crystal pleats and ivory combs, giggling behind fans.

‘But the star of the show is this dollhouse.’ Leyna paused to let the minicam frame the Doll’s White House. ‘Naturally enough. This
is
Washington, D.C., after all. This is Dorothy Hardesty Douglas’s Doll’s White House, a remarkable replica of the Executive Mansion.’

Now in the camera’s vision, there was another person, a small, delicate platinum-haired woman wrapped in gauzy silver.

‘Is it true that when you were first given this dollhouse, you didn’t like it?’ Leyna asked.

‘Not exactly, “didn’t like.” I thought I was too old for it. Now I suspect I was too young.’ Dolly mocked herself lightly.

‘You feel differently now?’

‘Oh, yes. When I rediscovered it among my father’s effects, after his death, I fell in love with it. I determined to make it an ideal White House.’

‘An ideal White House?’ Leyna probed. ‘It isn’t an exact replica of the White House?’

‘Not as it is now or as it ever existed. The real White House always seems to be in a state of flux. The obvious anomalies,’ here Dolly’s small square hands flew in delicate gestures over the surprising bulk of the dollhouse, ‘the lack of wings, which contain executive offices and aren’t very interesting, really, and the absence of the underground stories where the present household offices are housed. Essentially this little White House contains the historic public rooms and the private quarters, much as they existed in the nineteenth century.’

‘And you’ve decorated it?’

‘The prevailing decoration is after Jacqueline Kennedy, modified by my own personal tastes, particularly in the private quarters. She grasped the historic function of the White House very nicely and had excellent taste. Really, though, this White House is the White House I would have, if I lived there.’

Leyna looked straight into the camera again. ‘Leyna Shaw from the Dalton Institute in Washington, D.C.,’ she cast a brief, amused look at the Doll’s White House, ‘taking a look at Dolly’s White House.’

The red light on the camera went black and stayed that way. Leyna smiled coolly at Dolly, who stood unmoving, her face a sudden mask. Dolly’s head moved stiffly up and back, like a snake bearing its fangs. Her eyes were wide and shocked. She turned on her heel and walked away.

Leyna nodded a dismissal to her crew and handed in her mike, saying
thank yous
as she passed by. She was free to join the party. As she searched the crowd, decided where to move first, someone handed her a glass of champagne. She found herself hand in hand with Nick Weiler.

‘Thanks, love,’ Nick said. ‘Dorothy’s pissed at
VIP
for that trick, and now she’s pissed at you for it, and she’s royally pissed at me.’

‘Good. Maybe she’ll drown in it,’ Leyna said pleasantly.

‘You miss the point. She might have endowed the Dalton, she might have given us the bloody dollhouse, the rest of her collection. She owns several Sartorises, you know!’

Leyna shrugged elegantly. ‘I had no idea old Mike had stolen so much. Sorry, I didn’t know. Thought it was all wrapped up. And I think you’re being greedy about the Sartorises. Isn’t your father going to dump the lot on the Dalton when he kicks it?’

‘Who knows what my father’s going to do?’

‘Well, can’t you fuck her out of them?’

‘Why don’t you talk like that on the air?’ Nick couldn’t help grinning. ‘Millions of perverts would be ecstatic.’

‘I was saving it for you.’ Leyna swayed closer to him. ‘I remember hearing you and Dolly aren’t that close anymore.

Picked up with sweet little Lucy, the hero’s brave widow, haven’t

you?’

‘I thought you were looking after the interests of the Republic, keeping an eye on the politicians, and here I find out you spend your time listening to low gossip,’ he twitted back.

‘Same thing, and I do have time for other things. Your ears should be getting red, darling. I just saw your friend Lucy with Dolly. I bet they’re comparing notes. Not that you have any shame.’

‘I was saving it for you,’ Nick said.

Leyna laughed, low in her throat.

Nick Weiler clasped his hands behind his back. He looked like a cat near a swinging door.

‘Will you do the
Sunday
segment on the Dalton?’ he asked.

‘Roddie’s doing enough film tonight to paste something together,’ she answered him. ‘We’ll need some talkee-talkee with you, of course. Let’s plan it out tonight.’

Leyna wasn’t kind enough to look the other way while Nick fought with himself. He damned her internally for her boldness. But why should she be shy with him?

‘I’ll be here late, shutting up the store,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll try.’

Leyna nodded. ‘Good.’ She waved at someone she knew.

‘Excuse me,’ Nick said, but it was Leyna who moved off, with a vague pat on his arm, and a cool social brush of her lips on his.

The Dalton was empty of all but staff when Nick found Lucy again, curled up in a tangle of wraps on the sofa in his office. She was not so much asleep, as he discovered when he bent to kiss her, as passed out. So much for the prince’s magic kiss tonight.

He managed to bundle her into the car. She huddled as far from him as she could, slipping from half-consciousness to sleep and back again many times on the ride home. He was wretchedly aware of the distance separating them. It was as if the sea had ebbed unexpectedly and left him with the endless flats and a distant curl of water catching light.

Mr. Novick was asleep too, in front of the rolling patterns of the television screen. Nick paused to turn off the set, while Lucy kicked off her shoes. She presented a blind cheekbone for a glassy kiss and, picking up her shoes, slipped up the stairs to her bedroom without a word.

Nick let himself out, relieved to escape her silence. It had been bad enough that she wouldn't talk to him, worse that she seemed to prefer unconsciousness to his company. He felt distinctly like a blind date that hadn’t passed approval.

He turned back to the lights of the city, aware of not being the least bit sleepy. It seemed as if he might be the only person among millions who was not asleep. A rare and sudden surge of anger tore through him. He wanted to go back into the house and make love to Lucy. Except that he didn’t want to make love to her. He wanted her to lie still and unresponsive, like a mannequin, or a rag doll; he wanted to punish her with his sex.

He drove fast, sweating out the fear of his own anger. He might be able to talk to his father about this new experience of rage in love; the old gambler must understand what it was. But his father was far away on his island, sleeping the sleep of the old and justified. Leyna’s address was not far out of his way. She would at least return him to himself.

She had removed her silly high heels and they stood eye to eye. A long time later, he was able to sleep.

Lucy was glad when the
Sunday
segment finished interviewing Nick and let him narrate clips from the dollhouse exhibition. She could watch the dollhouses and their contents, and divorce the even, still faintly British-public-school-accented voice from him.

Little girls, and sometimes not-so-little girls, have played with dollhouses for as long as human memory can recall. Generation after generation of children have played at house, with their own child-size or smaller version of their parents’ tools and utensils, furniture, and the rooms to put them in, turning learning into play as children do, practicing at living.

The camera illustrated: tiny blue enamel spatterware pots and pans, a brass sewing machine, a cradle, fairy-size toys for the dolls’ babies.

Adults too made miniature forms of their possessions and buildings for purposes other than childrens’ play. From the time of the pharaohs, in whose tombs tiny jewellike models of every kind of thing that the people used have been found, people have made what we call now miniatures, not only for religious purposes, but for merchandising. There were miniature objects that were samples of goods too heavy or bulky to be casually transported, or which were models of future full-scale things (many dollhouses, even today, are in fact architectural models of real buildings) . . .

An enameled and gilded altar, one-seventh of the size of the original, was displayed against dark velvet. A toy train, with a tiny, shabby engineer in it; a gleaming, polished piano; an iron oven, showed to less splendor before an elegant Edwardian dollhouse; the architect’s model of a long-vanished Manhattan townhouse.

... or that were samples in the sense of today’s commercial samples, enticements to buy. Dollhouses and miniatures have been used as teaching aids, so that little girls of bygone eras might learn the complicated arts of housewifery . . .

A clumsy-looking iron; folded and yellowed linen; rusty knives and spoons of wildly varying sizes; a set of crystal glasses and a decanter; a drying rack; a moth-eaten bellows; all shown in a disproportionately huge kitchen, so crowded with utensils and tools that no self-respecting doll could hope to get a minute’s work done in the clutter.

. . . Other dollhouses preserve past ways of life, domestic arts of other times, or sometimes famous rooms or famous houses. It is the grown-up collector or miniatures-maker who is interested in historical illustration, of course. And sometimes, we find a dollhouse that someone’s passion and skill has made a work of art, in response to that instinct of human beings to transmute the most mundane objects into something more.

The final vision of the camera was at the Stettheimer dollhouse, the 1920s creation of a trio of sisters that is at once a work of art, a historic illustration of a period life-style, and a never-neverland toy, a dollhouse for not-so-little girls.

What draws us to dollhouses and their tiny furnishings? Perhaps it is a simple, obvious, and appropriately childish reason— littleness: the reproduction of our world on a reduced scale, in which we are in charge, just as we were when we played at being Mom and Dad, parents to our dollies, which become ourselves.

Lucy’s father snorted as the segment ended. ‘Piled that a little high, didn’t you, Nick?’ he addressed a shiny new luxury automobile being huckstered by a Swedish tennis star. He cast a worried glance at Lucy, silent in her rocking chair. He didn’t have the slightest idea what had gone wrong, only that Lucy was unhappy and it seemed to be Nick Weiler’s fault. He liked Nick, but Lucy’s stolid misery provoked a strong displeasure with the fellow.

‘Turn it off, will you, Pop?’ Lucy asked abruptly. She stood up and stretched. ‘That’s all over.’

The older man watched her walk upstairs, seemingly only tired. He wished he knew what was wrong. Vexed, mildly infected with her depression, he turned the volume down and settled in to watch the late night news.

A few days later, he draped himself into a chaise and read a newspaper in the shade of his straw hat. Laurie and Zach played with a handful of neighborhood kids within sight and hearing. A transistor radio reported a ball game in progress from its perch on a nearby picnic table.

It was all pleasantly somnolent, the sort of spring day he had come to savor. A small cloud hove into view in the shape of Nick Weiler’s tapping little Mercedes.

Mr. Novick waved at Nick and took off his hat long enough to tip at the workshop. His speckled pate gleamed in the sun and then the straw hat came down firmly over it. He grinned a broad, dentured smile, and shook Nick’s hand in passing. There wasn’t anything much to say besides how-dos. He hoped, for the sake of a fine day, that they would make it up.

Nick, walking around to the workshop, was struck with the thought that Mr. Novick was less than ten years his senior. Disability, alcoholism, and bitterness had aged Lucy’s father so that he looked and acted twenty years older. He had put even his failures behind him and lived in resigned contentment with what he had salvaged, a backwater life with his daughter. Nick supposed he was grateful for any kind of family at all.

Lucy rarely talked about her father, or the disintegration of her parents’ marriage, which she was old enough to remember, or her own marriage to Harrison Douglas, Jr. How long had they been seeing each other before she would talk without apology about her kids? She was so tightly furled; he was only beginning to understand that what she held back, in reticence or discretion or her own need for privacy, weighed against him. He had not gained her complete trust. And he knew it was only partly her fault.

He leaned against the doorpost silently a moment, watching her work. She looked up briefly, to see who cast a shadow over her, and acknowledged his uninvited presence with a sudden bloom of color over her cheekbones.

‘What do you want?’ she said abruptly. Her fingers pushed sandpaper over wood with a vicious grating sound.