The living room of the apartment also held a small bookcase, in which the first Mr. Halloran had kept the books he used in his mail order education; Aunt Fanny had put them back. They had been in a carton labelled, in her mother’s straight handwriting, “Michael’s books.” There was even among them a book on etiquette, with the passages on the uses of table silver underlined by her father, who memorized laboriously and slowly, and never forgot what he had once learned.
On top of the bookcase Aunt Fanny, with unerring, almost supernatural memory, had put the framed photographs of her grandparents. In those first proud years the Hallorans had bought themselves a victrola, paying for it month by month, and it had stood, polished and handsome, with an imitation mahogany finish, in one corner of their living room. Aunt Fanny had never played it in the big house, and had been too small to be trusted with it in the apartment; the records were carefully preserved in a compartment at the bottom of the machines, which opened to receive them in grooved individual sections. Aunt Fanny recognized the indefinable smell of the phonograph, of oil and mothballs and furniture polish, more clearly than she remembered the Caruso record, or Madame Schumann-Heink, or Chaliapin, singing “The Song of the Flea.”
The four rooms in the apartment, which Aunt Fanny had so carefully put back together, included the living room, the kitchen, the parental bedroom, and the bedroom which small Frances and Richard had shared. In the kitchen the stove was cold, the icebox warm, but Aunt Fanny scrubbed regularly the oilcloth on the kitchen table where she had sat for meals with her mother and father and brother—the high chair used by Richard and then Frances stood still in a corner, where Mrs. Halloran had kept it because she never threw anything away, and never let anything decay; there were four chairs around the kitchen table and Aunt Fanny had washed her mother’s everyday dishes and put them into the shelves of the dish cabinet and washed her mother’s company china and put it into the shelves of the glass-fronted imitation mahogany breakfront which had been meant to go into the living room but had been crowded back into the kitchen. There were two extra chairs in the kitchen, so solidly built that they still stood steady, there was a second cabinet, painted blue like the first, and matching the oilcloth table cover, which had once held food, in cans and boxes; it had a flour bin and a built-in sifter, and, below, a bin for potatoes and onions. Aunt Fanny had washed her mother’s silverware, which had been a wedding present, and put it into the drawers of the kitchen table, and in the cabinet where the food had been kept Aunt Fanny had unpacked and stored away the neat piles of dish towels, dish cloths, pot holders, and table napkins.
The beds were set up in the bedrooms, and Aunt Fanny had made them—the big mahogany double bed in her parents’ bedroom had a neat, intricately crocheted spread which her mother had made when she was not much older than the girl in the middy blouse and long hair, and had stored in her cedar hope chest; there was her father’s dresser, plain and stiff, matching the imitation mahogany bed and the dressing table, which had always seemed unlike her mother to Aunt Fanny, but of course it had come with the bedroom set and had to be used. Aunt Fanny had placed a picture of her father, stern and uncomfortable, on her mother’s dressing table, and a picture of her mother, cloudy-haired and idealized, on her father’s dresser. The upholstery of the little bench before the dressing table was rose brocade, and Aunt Fanny had found the carton which held the little pink pebbled-glass pin tray, and the matching powder jar, and her mother’s ivory-backed brush and comb and mirror, and had set these things, in correct order, on the dressing table. Her father’s twin silver hairbrushes were on the dresser. The two pink hooked rugs were on the floor on either side of the bed. In the cedar hope chest were spare sheets and blankets; in the drawers of the dressing table and the dresser were the contents of three cartons, one labelled “My clothes,” one “Michael’s clothes,” and one, “Michael’s work clothes.”
In the other bedroom—there had once been a door between the two bedrooms, left open in case a child cried in the night—were the small bed on which Richard had slept, and the crib in which Frances had slept until she was five; the first Mrs. Halloran had been planning and saving to re-furnish the children’s bedroom when her husband cancelled all her plans by deciding on the big house. Aunt Fanny could remember the wallpaper in here—it had had a design of dancing bears—and the rest of the room was intact. She and Richard could have moved back here if they would. The little pink dresser had belonged to Frances, and in it Aunt Fanny had put the contents of the carton labelled “Frances, baby clothes.” The little blue dresser had belonged to Richard, and it held “Richard, baby clothes,” and “Richard, clothes,” since Richard had been older when they left. There was a little bookcase, and from it Aunt Fanny had read “Alice in Wonderland,” with an odd sense of distortion, since she could only remember her mother’s voice reading it to her. There were two toyboxes, one labelled “RICHARD” and one “FRANCES,” and in them Aunt Fanny had put, dividing with scrupulous fairness, the contents of the cartons labelled “Richard, toys,” and “Frances, toys,” and “Children, blocks, chalk, etc.” Some day, Aunt Fanny thought foolishly, I must bring Richard up here and see if he wants to play.
There were two cartons Aunt Fanny had not unpacked. One, labelled “Wedding presents” she had not unpacked because it had never been unpacked. Inside it were the silver tea service, the silver cake servers, the handsome clock, which her mother and father had received as wedding presents and put away safely, planning to take them out to use some day when they had a nicer apartment, with more space for cake servers and handsome mantel clocks, but when Mr. Halloran brought his wife and children to the big house the carton was put away in the attic room with the other furniture because Mr. Halloran had insisted arrogantly that the big house be complete down to every slightest detail before he brought his wife there. In the big house there was no need for any further cake servers; the silver tea service was inferior to the graceful modern set Mr. Halloran put into the big house, and the handsome clock would only have looked vulgar on the mantel of Mrs. Halloran’s bedroom, where she wanted it, next to the dainty porcelain clock Mr. Halloran had put there.
If Aunt Fanny had cared to, she might have lived entirely in the apartment inside the house, cooking her meals on her mother’s stove, sleeping in her parents’ bed, putting records on the victrola.
The second carton Aunt Fanny never unpacked she had set away in a corner of her parents’ bedroom. It was labelled “Souvenirs,” and Aunt Fanny, knowing that it held a curl—wrapped in a linen handkerchief—from her head, and one from Richard’s, and the ill-colored, straggling cards they had given her mother on Mother’s Day and Christmas, and perhaps letters from Michael Halloran, was afraid of what further she might find, what autograph albums, valentines, dance programs that might have belonged to the strange girl with the long hair among the photographs.
If Aunt Fanny had cared to, she might have dropped from sight altogether into this apartment in the big house, might have left the others behind and gone into the apartment and closed the door, and stayed.
_____
“Come along,” Aunt Fanny said to Fancy; she had been looking for Fancy and had finally called her from the gardens to come upstairs; Aunt Fanny met her on the great staircase and took her hand. “I want to show you something,” Aunt Fanny said. “Just so you will know how well Aunt Fanny loves you, I want to show you something no one has seen for many years.”
“Where?” said Fancy, but came obediently with Aunt Fanny along the hall and to the stairway which led to the third floor, “Where, Aunt Fanny?”
“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 m
other 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 anything 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?”
The Sundial Page 18