The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Charles! Take care, it’s very hot.”

  Not in a small cappuccino cup but in a hearty coffee mug, Aaron Neuhaus serves me the pungent brewed coffee, with its delightful frothed milk. The liquid is rich, very dark, scalding-hot as he has warned. I am wondering if I should take out of my attaché case the box of Lindt chocolates to share with my host, or whether it is just slightly too soon—I don’t want to arouse his suspicion. If—when—Aaron Neuhaus eats one of these potent chocolates I will want to depart soon after, and our ebullient hour together will come to an abrupt conclusion. It is foolish of me perhaps, but I am almost thinking—well, it is not very realistic, but indeed, I am thinking—Why could we not be partners? If I introduce myself as a serious book collector, one with unerring taste (if not unlimited resources, as he seems to have)—would not Aaron Neuhaus be impressed with me? Does he not, already, like me—and trust me?

  At the same time, my brain is pragmatically pursuing the more probable course of events: if I wait until Aaron Neuhaus lapses into a coma, I could take away with me a select few of his treasures, instead of having to wait until I can purchase Mystery, Inc. Though I am not a common thief, it has been exciting to see such rare items on display; almost, in a sense, dangled before me, by my clueless prey. Several of the less-rare items would be all that I could dare, for it would be a needless risk to take away, for instance, the Dickens first edition valued at $75,000—just the sort of greedy error that could entrap me.

  “Are you often in these parts, Charles? I don’t think that I have seen you in my store before.”

  “No, not often. In the summer, sometimes . . .” My voice trails off uncertainly. Is it likely that a bookstore proprietor would see, and take note, of every customer who comes into his store? Or am I interpreting Aaron Neuhaus too literally?

  “My former wife and I sometimes drove to Boothbay, Maine. I believe we passed through this beautiful town, but did not stop.” My voice is somewhat halting, but certainly sincere. Blindly I continue, “I am not married now—unfortunately. My wife had been my high school sweetheart but she did not share my predilection for precious old books, I’m afraid.”

  Is any of this true? I am hoping only that such words have the ring of plausibility.

  “I’ve long been a lover of mysteries—in books and in life. It’s wonderful to discover a fellow enthusiast, and in such a beautiful store . . .”

  “It is! Always a wonderful discovery. I, too, am a lover of mysteries, of course—in life as in books.”

  Aaron Neuhaus laughs expansively. He has been blowing on his mug of cappuccino, for it is still steaming. I am intrigued by the subtle distinction of his remark, but would require some time to ponder it—if indeed it is a significant remark, and not just casual banter.

  Thoughtfully, Neuhaus continues: “It is out of the profound mystery of life that ‘mystery books’ arise. And, in turn, ‘mystery books’ allow us to see the mystery of life more clearly, from perspectives not our own.”

  On a shelf behind the affable bookseller’s desk are photographs that I have been trying to see more clearly. One, in an antique oval frame, is of an extraordinarily beautiful, young, black-haired woman—could this be Mrs. Neuhaus? I think it must be, for in another photograph she and a youthful Aaron Neuhaus are together, in wedding finery—a most attractive couple.

  There is something profoundly demoralizing about this sight—such a beautiful woman, married to this man not so very different from myself! Of course—(I am rapidly calculating, cantilevering to a new, objective perspective)—the young bride is no longer young, and would be, like her husband, in her early sixties. No doubt Mrs. Neuhaus is still quite beautiful. It is not impossible to think that, in the devastated aftermath of losing her husband, the widow might not be adverse, in time, to remarriage with an individual who shares so much of her late husband’s interests, and has taken over Mystery, Inc. . . . Other photographs, surely family photos, are less interesting, though suggesting that Neuhaus is a “family man” to some degree. (If we had more time, I would ask about these personal photos; but I suppose I will find out eventually who Neuhaus’s relatives are.)

  Also on the shelf behind Neuhaus’s desk is what appears to be a homemade artwork—a bonsai-sized tree (fashioned from a coat hanger?)—upon which small items have been hung: a man’s signet ring, a man’s wristwatch, a brass belt buckle, a pocket watch with a gold chain. If I didn’t know that Neuhaus had no children, I would presume that this amateurish “art” has found a place amid the man’s treasures which its artistry doesn’t seem to merit.

  At last, the cappuccino is not so scalding. It is still hot, but very delicious. Now I am wishing badly that I’d prepared a box of macaroons, more appropriate here than chocolate truffles.

  As if I have only just now recalled it, I remove the Lindt box from my attaché case. An unopened box, I suggest to Aaron Neuhaus—freshly purchased and not a chocolate missing.

  (It is true, I am reluctant to hurry our fascinating conversation, but—there is a duty here that must be done.)

  In a display of playful horror Neuhaus half-hides his eyes—“Chocolate truffles—my favorite chocolates—and my favorite truffles! Thank you, Charles, but—I should not. My dear wife will expect me to be reasonably hungry for dinner.” The bookseller’s voice wavers, as if he is hoping to be encouraged.

  “Just one chocolate won’t make any difference, Aaron. And your dear wife will never know, if you don’t tell her.”

  Neuhaus is very amusing as he takes one of the chocolate truffles—(from the first, poisoned row)—with an expression both boyishly greedy and guilty. He sniffs it with delight and seems about to bite into it—then lays it on his desk top as if temporarily, in a show of virtue. He winks at me as at a fellow conspirator—“You are quite right, my dear wife needn’t know. There is much in marriage that might be kept from a spouse, for her own good. Though possibly, I should bring my wife one of these also—if you could spare another, Charles?”

  “Why of course—but—take more than one . . . Please help yourself—of course.”

  This is disconcerting. But there is no way for me to avoid offering Neuhaus the box again, this time somewhat awkwardly, turning it so that he is led to choose a chocolate truffle out of a row of nonpoisoned truffles. And I will eat one with much appetite, so that Neuhaus is tempted to eat his.

  How warm I am! And these damned whiskers itching!

  As if he has only just thought of it, Aaron Neuhaus excuses himself to call his wife—on an old-fashioned black dial phone, talisman of another era. He lowers his voice out of courtesy, not because he doesn’t want his visitor to overhear. “Darling? Just to alert you, I will be a little late tonight. A most fascinating customer has dropped by—whom I don’t want to shortchange.” Most fascinating. I am flattered by this, though saddened.

  So tenderly does Neuhaus speak to his wife, I feel an almost overwhelming wave of pity for him, and for her; yet, more powerfully, a wave of envy, and anger. Why does this man deserve that beautiful woman and her love, while I have no one—no love—at all?

  It is unjust, and it is unfair. It is intolerable.

  Neuhaus tells his wife he will be home, he believes, by at least 8:30 p.m. Again it is flattering to me, that Neuhaus thinks so well of me; he doesn’t plan to send me away for another hour. Another wife might be annoyed by such a call, but the beautiful (and mysterious) Mrs. Neuhaus does not object. “Yes! Soon. I love you too, darling.” Neuhaus unabashedly murmurs these intimate words, like one who isn’t afraid to acknowledge emotion.

  The chocolate truffle, like the cappuccino, is indeed delicious. My mouth waters even as I eat it. I am hoping that Neuhaus will devour his, as he clearly wants to; but he has left both truffles untouched for the moment, while he sips the cappuccino. There is something touchingly childlike in this procrastination—putting off a treat, if but for a moment. I will not allow myself to think
of the awful possibility that Neuhaus will eat the unpoisoned truffle and bring the poisoned truffle home to his wife.

  To avoid this, I may offer Neuhaus the entire box to take home to his wife. In that way, both the owner of Mystery, Inc. and the individual who would inherit it upon his death will depart this earth. Purchasing the store from another, less personally involved heir might be, in fact, an easier stratagem.

  I have asked Aaron Neuhaus who his customers are in this out-of-the-way place, and he tells me that he has a number of “surprisingly faithful, stubbornly loyal” customers who come to his store from as far away as Boston, even New York City, in good weather at least. There are local regulars, and there are the summertime customers—“Mystery, Inc. is one of the most popular shops in town, second only to Starbucks.” Still, most of his sales in the past twenty-five years have been mail-order and online; the online orders are more or less continuous, emails that come in through the night from his “considerable overseas clientele.”

  This is a cruel blow! I’m sure that I have no overseas clientele at all.

  Yet it isn’t possible to take offense, for Aaron Neuhaus is not boasting so much as speaking matter-of-factly. Ruefully I am thinking—The man can’t help being superior. It is ironic, he must be punished for something that is not his fault.

  Like my brother, I suppose. Who had to be punished for something that wasn’t his fault: a mean-spirited soul, envious and malicious regarding me. Though I will regret Aaron Neuhaus’s fate, I will never regret my brother’s fate.

  Still, Aaron Neuhaus has put off eating his chocolate truffle with admirable restraint! By this time I have had a second, and Neuhaus is preparing two more cups of cappuccino. The caffeine is having a bracing effect upon my blood. Like an admiring interviewer I am asking my host where his interest in mystery derives, and Neuhaus replies that he fell under the spell of mystery as a young child, if not an infant—“I think it had to do with my astonishment at peering out of my crib and seeing faces peering at me. Who were they? My mother whom I did not yet know was my mother—my father whom I did not yet know was my father? These individuals must have seemed like giants to me—mythic figures—as in the Odyssey.” He pauses, with a look of nostalgia. “Our lives are odysseys, obviously—continuous, ever-unexpected adventures. Except we are not journeying home, like Odysseus, but journeying away from home inexorably, like the Hubble universe.”

  What is this?—“Hubble universe”? I’m not sure that I fully understand what Aaron Neuhaus is saying, but there is no doubt that my companion is speaking from the heart.

  As a boy he fell under the spell of mystery fiction—boys’ adventure, Sherlock Holmes, Ellery Queen, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson—and by the age of thirteen he’d begun reading true crime writers (like the esteemed Roughead) of the kind most readers don’t discover until adulthood. Though he has a deep and enduring love for American hard-boiled fiction, his long-abiding love is for Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens—“Writers not afraid of the role coincidence plays in our lives, and not afraid of over-the-top melodrama.”

  This is true. Coincidence plays far more of a role in our lives than we (who believe in free will) wish to concede. And lurid, over-the-top melodrama, perhaps a rarity in most lives, is but inescapable at one time or another.

  Next, I ask Aaron Neuhaus how he came to purchase his bookstore, and he tells me with a nostalgic smile that indeed it was an accident—a “marvelous coincidence”—that one day when he was driving along the coast to visit relatives in Maine, he happened to stop in Seabrook—“And there was this gem of a bookstore, right on High Street, in a row of beautiful old brownstones. The store wasn’t quite as it is now, slightly run-down, and neglected, yet with an intriguing sign out front—Mystery, Inc.: M. Rackham Books. Within minutes I saw the potential of the store and the location, and I fell in love with something indefinable in the very air of Seabrook, New Hampshire.”

  At this time, in 1982, Aaron Neuhaus owned a small bookstore that specialized in mystery, detective, and crime fiction in the West Village, on Bleecker Street; though he worked in the store as many as one hundred hours a week, with two assistants, he was chafing under the burden of circumscribed space, high rent and high taxes, relentless book-theft, and a clientele that included homeless derelicts and junkies who wandered into the store looking for public lavatories or for a place to sleep. His wife yearned to move out of New York City and into the ­country—she had an education degree and was qualified to teach school, but did not want to teach in the New York City public school system, nor did Neuhaus want her to. And so Neuhaus made a decision almost immediately to acquire the Seabrook bookstore—“If it were humanly possible.”

  It was an utterly impulsive decision, Neuhaus said. He had not even consulted with his dear wife. Yet, it was unmistakable—“Like falling in love at first sight.”

  The row of brownstones on High Street was impressive, but Mystery, Inc: M. Rackham Books was not so impressive. In the first-floor bay window were displayed the predictable bestsellers one would see in any bookstore window of the time, but here amid a scattering of dead flies; inside, most of the books were trade paperbacks with lurid covers and little literary distinction. The beautiful floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookshelves—­carpentry which would cost a fortune in 1982—were in place, the hammered-tin ceiling, hardwood floors. But so far as the young bookseller could see the store offered no first editions, rare or unusual books, or artworks; the second floor was used for storage, and the upper two floors were rented out. Still, the store was ideally situated on Seabrook’s main street overlooking the harbor, and it seemed likely that the residents of Seabrook were generally affluent, well-educated and discerning.

  Not so exciting, perhaps, as a store on Bleecker Street in the West Village—yet, it may be that excitement is an overrated experience if you are a serious bookseller.

  “After I’d been in the store for a few minutes, however, I could feel—something . . . An atmosphere of tension like the air preceding a storm. The place was virtually deserted on a balmy spring day. There were loud voices at the rear. There came then—in a hurry—the proprietor to speak eagerly with me, like a man who is dying of loneliness. When I introduced myself as a fellow bookseller, from New York City, Milton Rackham all but seized my hand. He was a large, soft-bodied, melancholic older gentleman whose adult son worked with him, or for him. At first Rackham talked enthusiastically of books—his favorites, which included, not surprisingly, the great works of Wilkie Collins, Dickens, and Conan Doyle. Then he began to speak with more emotion of how he’d been a young professor of classics at Harvard who, with his young wife who’d shared his love for books and bookstores, decided to quit the ‘sterile, self-absorbed’ academic world to fulfill a life’s dream of buying a bookstore in a small town and making it into a ‘very special place.’ Unfortunately his beloved wife had died after only a few years, and his unmarried son worked with him now in the store; in recent years, the son had become ‘inward, troubled, unpredictable, strange—a brooding personality.’”

  It was surprising to Neuhaus, and somewhat embarrassing, that the older bookseller should speak so openly to a stranger of these personal and painful matters. And the poor man spoke disjointedly, unhappily, lowering his voice so that his heavyset, ponytailed son (whom Neuhaus glimpsed shelving books at the rear of the store with a particular sort of vehemence, as if he were throwing livestock into vats of steaming scalding water) might not hear. In a hoarse whisper Rackham indicated to Neuhaus that the store would soon be for sale—“To the proper buyer.”

  “Now, I was truly shocked. But also . . . excited. For I’d already fallen in love with the beautiful old brownstone, and here was its proprietor, declaring that it was for sale.”

  Neuhaus smiles with a look of bittersweet nostalgia. It is enviable that a man can glance back over his life, and pre­sent the crucial episodes in his life, not with pain or regret but with—no
stalgia!

  Next, the young visitor invited Milton Rackham to speak in private with him, in his office—“Not here: Rackham’s office was on the first floor, a cubbyhole of a room containing one large, solid piece of furniture, this very mahogany desk, amid a chaos of books, galleys, boxes, unpaid bills and invoices, dust balls, and desperation”—about the bookstore, what it might cost with or without a mortgage; when it would be placed on the market, and how soon the new owner could take possession. Rackham brandished a bottle of whiskey, and poured drinks for them in “clouded” glasses; he searched for, and eventually found, a cellophane package of stale sourballs, which he offered to his guest. It was painful to see how Rackham’s hands shook. And alarming to see how the older man’s mood swerved from embittered to elated, from anxious to exhilarated, as he spoke excitedly to his young visitor, often interrupting himself with laughter, like one who has not spoken with anyone in a long time. He confided in Neuhaus that he didn’t trust his son—‘Not with our finances, not with book orders, not with maintaining the store, and not with my life.’ He’d once been very close to the boy, as he called him, but their relationship had altered significantly since his son’s fortieth birthday, for no clear reason. Unfortunately, he had no other recourse than to keep his son on at the store as he couldn’t afford to pay an employee a competitive wage, and the boy, who’d dropped out of Williams College midway through his freshman year, for ‘mental’ reasons, would have no other employment—‘It is a tragic trap, fatherhood! And my wife and I had been so happy in our innocence, long ago.’” Neuhaus shudders, recalling.

  “As Rackham spoke in his lowered voice I had a sudden fantasy of the son rushing into the office swinging a hand ax at us . . . I felt absolutely chilled—terrified . . . I swear, I could see that ax . . . It was as if the bookstore were haunted by something that had not yet happened.”