THE DOLL-HOUSE

by James Cross

 

"Two hundred and fifty dollars for your lousy Alumnae Fund," Jim Eliot said, holding the canceled check in his hand. "What the hell do you think they're going to do with it—name some building after you, the Julia Wardell Eliot memorial gateway?"

His wife looked at him coldly.

"Just because you went to the sort of place that gets its money from the state legislature, and all the professors are under civil service . . ."

"All right, all right, knock it off—only next time try balancing the checkbook first; you're lucky it didn't bounce. How the hell much do you think we have in the account?"

"How do I know? You're the great brain, you check the balance."

"About twenty-five dollars, plus my pay check tomorrow—$461.29 exactly, after deductions. And next week the mortgage, and the gas and electricity, and oil, and the doctor and the dentist and the car payments, and any bills you've run up for clothes."

"I've run up! Like the $250 cashmere suit you had to have last month. And the new golf clubs, and the credit card lunches—why don't you get on an expense account like everyone else?"

"All right," Eliot said wearily, "just let me balance the goddam account. If something's going to bounce I want to know about it."

"You just do that, lover," Julia said. "I'm going to bed—and don't wake me when you come up."

She swung around toward the door, the silk taffeta of her red housecoat rustling like a swarm of cicada—$99.75, Eliot thought savagely, Saks-Fifth Avenue. But the anger left him slowly as he thought of the bills, his as much as Julia's, the children's, the American way of life. Mortgage; country club; schools; lessons—for Christ's sake, dancing, and swimming and golf and tennis and ballet and the slide trombone; Dr. Smedley, the orthodontist, twenty-five bucks every time he tightened a screw on Pamela's braces; Michael at prep school and his J. Press sport jackets that seemed to average four a year; Julia's charge accounts and Dr. Himmelfarb at thirty dollars an hour because she was bored and scared, and pretty soon he'd be a candidate for the good doctor's couch himself; and, he forced himself to admit, his own clothes, his bar bills, the golf clubs, the expensive women he took out from time to time when he called Julia and told her he'd have to stay over in town. And above all, he thought, above all, me, myself, for allowing any of us to live this way, when I make $15,000 a year. But what can I do? he thought. In a couple or three years there'll be the vice-presidency open when old Calder retires; and I have to live as if I already had it, and if I don't they won't consider me—"not real executive timber"—and I'll end up like Charlie Wainwright—good old Charlie—chief cashier, with the small gold watch and the smaller pension.

There was a storm blowing up, the wind was rising, he could feel the too large house, with its second mortgage, creaking in the wind and calling out for money and more money, not just the extra personal loan he was paying off at usurious rates, but big money, a bundle, the long green.

He sat down wearily at the desk and began to figure it out. But even with the hypothetical Christmas bonus, he would still be in the red. For a while he could juggle bills, forget the doctor and dentist, stave off creditors, but sooner or later they would get nasty (while the new bills kept pouring in) and garnishee his salary, and that would be the end of him at the bank. It was two before he crawled into bed.

The next day was Saturday and he was up early, still groggy with fatigue, while the rest of the house slept. He left a note for Julia, saying he would be back in the afternoon, and then he drove north, toward his last hope.

It was not much of a hope. John Wardell, Julia's uncle, had never liked him and had never hidden his feelings. He had always let Eliot know he considered him a provincial arriviste who had had the insolence to marry into a fine old New England family. With his endowed Harvard chair, with his world-wide reputation as an authority on classical civilization, he made Eliot feel like some sort of trousered and bearded Goth trespassing in the Roman Senate. But Uncle John was retired now; he lived well in an old farmhouse upstate; he traveled to Greece and Italy every summer; he wintered in the West Indies. He should have a lot to leave Julia, his only relative, and Jim Eliot wanted to get some of it now, when they needed it, not later when it would just be extra income.

The huge black dog who began barking at him savagely, straining at its chain-link leash, reminded Eliot of the Roman hound from the Pompeian mural. Cave canem, he thought, standing back nervously, stretching out a carefully placating hand and waiting for someone to call the beast off. In a minute or two the front door opened and John Wardell stood there in corduroys and a red flannel shirt.

"Down, Brennus," he said, "quiet, boy."

The hound sat back impassively and Eliot walked by him nervously, with his hand outstretched.

"Well, Jim," John Wardell said, giving him a perfunctory handshake, "I don't see you here often; you must be in trouble. Come in and have a drink."

It took a long time to get it out—three drinks, in fact—but in the end Eliot told it all to the old man who hated him.

"It's not for myself, it's for Julia and the kids. If I don't get some help, we're dead."

"Of course, of course, Jim," the old man said, "I know you're not thinking about yourself. But just the same," he said, smiling maliciously, "I don't see any way out of it—unless you start embezzling from the bank."

Eliot jerked his head nervously, as if the old man were reading his mind. Then he forced a smile.

"I was thinking you might be able to tide us over for a while . . .Uncle John," he added, gravely and sincerely.

John Wardell began to laugh.

"You think I have money, Jim? You think Julia has expectations? You're waiting for dead men's shoes? Good God, all I have is my pension, and not much of that, and the big annuity I bought years ago. That takes care of it all. There's enough for me to live on, and it ends when I die."

Eliot looked at him hopelessly and extended his glass for a refill. Oblivious of the old man's clinical, detached amusement.

"The hell of it is," he said loudly, "if I had a bit of money, I couldn't lose. I could spread the risks. The trend is up. I could be rich."

"But you have even less than nothing, Jim," the old man said, "you owe more than you possess. Even if you could know the future, you couldn't raise enough to make it worth while."

"If I knew the future," Eliot said, "I could get hold of the money somehow."

"Is that all you want, Jim? That's really pretty simple. All you need is an oracle to consult—or a sibyl, as the Romans called it. You ask the questions, and the god gives you the answer through his priestess. No house should be without one."

For a while Eliot had thought that the old man had softened to him. Now, looking at the over-red cynical lips below the hawk nose and the white halo of hair, he knew that the fires were only banked.

"How would you like your own oracle, Jim?"

"If you're not going to help, don't needle me."

"There's a story in Petronius about an oracle in a bottle in Cumae. You just feed her regularly and she lives forever. Could you use something like that?"

"I'm going," Eliot said, struggling to his feet unsteadily.

"This is no joke, Jim. I've owed you a wedding present for eighteen years, and now I think I'll give you one. Just sit down."

John Wardell left the room, and in two minutes returned carrying a small doll-house. He put it carefully on the table. Eliot looked at it curiously. It was not the standard Victorian-mansion doll-house but strangely reminiscent of something he had seen ten years ago, on his one trip to Europe, at Pompeii.

The old man looked at him carefully.

"You recognize it? The house of the Vettii at Pompeii. In perfect scale. Look at the atrium and the pool, the rooms to the sides. I bought it there."

Eliot lowered his head to gaze through the gate into the atrium and the pool. From that position he could see nothing else; but he remembered that with most doll-houses the roof was hinged and could be lifted so as to give a bird's-eye view of the interior. He fumbled around the side of the model looking for a hook to unfasten. For a moment he thought he heard a scurrying noise inside the doll-house. He drew back his hand sharply, brushing against the structure and almost knocking it off the table.

"Leave it alone," John Wardell said, suddenly and sharply. "Don't look at the Oracle, she doesn't like it. Never do it, on your life."

"Are you trying to say there's something inside?"

"I don't need to, you heard her move. But don't open it, ever."

"How does it operate, then?" Eliot asked, humoring the old man.

"Do you see that empty pool past the atrium? Well, write your question on a slip of paper, fold it up and put it in the pool. Get a tiny bowl and fill it with milk sweetened with honey and push it inside the gateway. Then go away and the next morning take the piece of paper from the pool. There will be an answer written on it."

"Can you make it work faster?"

"Sometimes it can be done, but I wouldn't advise you to try. It stirs things up."

"Can't you make it work right now? Show me."

John Wardell shrugged his shoulders. Then he went to the kitchen and returned with a dried bay leaf. He lit it, holding it until it smoked aromatically. Then he pushed it into the doll-house, watching the pungent vapor curl through it.

"Now," he said, "what you want to know. Anything. Write it down quickly."

Eliot tore off a slip of paper and wrote on one side of it, "Who will win the World Series?" Then he folded it and slipped it into the empty pool.

"All right," John Wardell said, "we have to leave. Bring the bottle."

When they returned in half an hour, the pungent bay-leaf vapor had died out. Wardell leaned down and reached into the doll-house. In his hand was a folded piece of paper which he handed to Eliot.

Eliot unfolded it and read it quickly. Then he read it more slowly.

"Fringillidae sunt," he quoted, "what kind of crap is that?"

"The second word is easy," John Wardell said. "It means 'they [the winners] are.' But Fringillidae, wait a minute."

He pulled out the third volume of a twenty-volume classical dictionary, thumbed through it for a minute or two, then shook his head.

"It's a new word to me. I've never seen it."

"Then what the hell good is it?"

"I should have told you, the Oracle uses several languages and she tends to be obscure. You know—'If King Croesus crosses the river Halys with his army, he will destroy a mighty empire'—which one? Well, as it turned out, his own. He just didn't read it right."

"Don't worry about me, I can figure it out."

"Well, in that case you have no troubles."

There was a tinge of unpleasant mockery in Uncle John's voice, as though he knew something very nasty about Eliot, something the younger man should also sense about himself, something, above all, at which he should bridle if he owned the sensitivity to understand or the touchy sense of personal honor to take offense.

Then, abruptly, Eliot caught himself. This was advanced senility talking. He wanted money, a life preserver, a hook to fasten into the mountain from which he was falling, and here this crazy and slightly malevolent old bastard was offering him dreams and fantasies.

"Look, I don't know how you worked this dime store Cassandra, but if it isn't too much bother, would you mind telling me how this—this Oracle happened? I mean, what the hell is she? Where did she come from?"

"You really don't know?" the old man asked him. "No, I forgot, you wouldn't, of course. I imagine you majored in business administration, or salesmanship, or art appreciation at that educational cafeteria you attended."

Like uncle, like niece, Eliot thought savagely, remembering Julia's taunts the night before. You'd think I was some kind of a savage because I didn't go to Harvard. For a moment he was tempted to walk out, but his need and desperation were too great; and, too, for the first time in their association, he told himself he could sense something different from the cold, mocking hostility with which the old man normally treated him, as if Eliot had advanced from the status of outsider to that of bungling, inferior relative, but nonetheless relative. Or perhaps to the status of a large, stupid, clumsy dog with annoying habits, but still not completely outside.

"The Cumaean Sibyl," Uncle John went on, "as you would know if you had been given a decent education, was believed to be immortal. Originally, she was a young priestess of Apollo, and the god spoke through her lips when she was in a trance and foretold the future to those who asked. There were half a dozen such priestesses operating, but the one at Cumae took the fancy of the god Apollo and he gave her two presents—the gift of prophecy and immortality. Like any other mortal suitor, he was fatuously in love—but not completely so: when he caught his girl friend out on the grass one night with a local fisherman, he couldn't take away the gifts he had granted her, but he had wisely held back on giving her eternal youth to go along with immortality. And just to make sure there would be no more young fishermen, he reduced her to the size of a large mouse, shut her up in a box and turned her over to the priests of the temple to use for all eternity."

"You believe all this hogwash?"

Uncle John almost shrugged. There was too much uncertainty in the gesture for it to have been called a definite movement.

"I don't know really. There is a story in Livy that the second king of Rome talked with the immortal oracle at Cumae, and that was around 700 B.C. And then a contemporary reference in Petronius seven or eight hundred years after indicates that the same person, or maybe creature, was alive in his day, still functioning. I've tried to find out on several occasions, to go beyond the myths, but each time I get a reply that only confuses me more. Maybe she fell from the sky and couldn't get back. Maybe you'd feel more scientific and rational if I talked in terms of slipping over from another continuum, another frame of illusion, some other . . ."

"Oh, Christ, cut the crap," Eliot said under his breath. Then aloud, "What is it inside—a cockroach, a mouse, or what? How do you do the writing trick? Is it like the old money machine?"

"As long as you don't open the top and try to find out, and as long as it tells you what will be, what does it matter? If you find it more comforting to believe I'm a trainer of rodents or lice, or am lapsing into senility, then do so. Or if your conception of the universe is too limited to accept a miracle—from Mars or the Moon, or the past or the future, or wherever—then leave it by all means, and we'll both consider this visit fruitless. All I can tell you is that I bought it a few years ago somewhere between Cumae and the ruins of Pompeii, that I got it cheap, and that I've seen it work. 'La vecchia religione'—the old religion, the man said, and he wanted a quick sale—probably dug it up illegally."

The old kook really believes it, Eliot thought. He found himself looking at the older man with growing disquiet. Not for a moment did he believe that within the doll-house was the Oracle of Pompeii or Cumae or wherever the hell it came from; but the old man seemed convinced of it, and he had learned not to underestimate the old man. Could it be? Had the night suddenly opened like a giant mouth, just beyond his peripheral range of understanding, and belched forth a genuine miracle? He decided to go along with the weird . . .

"Look," Eliot said suddenly. "I believe you about the money. You just have the pension and annuity. Otherwise you're broke; and so am I. But will you sell it to me? I can't pay now, but if this thing works, I'll have plenty, I've got some angles figured out already. Just put a price on it."

"No," the old man said. "Just take it as a delayed wedding present. You can have it. I know all I want about the future at my age. Like a fool, last year I asked it how long I would live—and it's not pleasant to know."

Uncle John Wardell paused and looked at Eliot with an odd expression. It was a very brief pause and a moment later the old man had resumed his normal controlled and guarded look; but in that transitory second Eliot, impervious as he usually was to other people's unexpressed feelings, had read the cold despairing hatred of someone who is going to die for someone who is going to live.

"Go on, take it," the old man continued. "Just remember to feed the Oracle every night, milk and honey. Don't open the top of the house. She doesn't like to be disturbed or looked at. Leave your question at night, but don't expect an answer until the morning. Don't try to rush her."

"I really appreciate this," Eliot said.

"Nothing at all," the old man replied, smiling oddly. "Don't thank me yet. You can show yourself out, I imagine."

When Eliot got home, he was surprised to find that Julia was rather touched that he had visited Uncle John on his own. She was warm and affectionate, and it was not until late at night that he was able to go quietly out to the car, while she slept, and take the doll-house down to the little plyboard room in the cellar that was his undisturbed private study.

On Monday he took the slip of paper to the public library and asked for a translation. In the ensuing days he made ten phone calls unavailingly, while the World Series became locked at three games apiece and the bookmakers' odds fluctuated wildly. Finally, two days after the end of the Series, the slip of paper got to a reference librarian who had majored in zoology as an undergraduate. Fringillidae, Eliot was told, was a genus of birds of which the North American cardinal was among the best known.

He stood there, scratching his head, two days too late to collect on the victory of the St. Louis Cardinals. It was then that he realized that the predictions of the Oracle were sometimes too obscure to be of value, sometimes too late to profit by.

In the next weeks he tested the Oracle, each night faithfully putting out the bowl of milk and honey, each morning, when he had left a question, patiently pulling out the answer. He was becoming satisfied with the tests.

In late October he asked the Oracle who would win the presidential election and got the answer: filius Johanni victor est. By that time he had invested in a Latin dictionary and had no difficulty in translating the less than elegant Latin (after all, the Oracle was Greek by birth), "The son of John is the victor," a day or so before he read the headlines, "Johnson Landslide."

But he was still cautious. The next week he asked the Oracle whether he should buy Space Industries, Ltd., of Canada, selling at two cents a share. The two words "caveat emptor," warned him off, so that it was with little surprise that he read the next month that the shares had dropped to nothing and that the officers of the company had been indicted.

As a last test, he asked the Oracle when John Wardell would die. He was still looking at the reply, "ille fuit," when the long-distance call for Julia told them that the old man had died that night in his sleep. Poor old boy, Eliot thought as he sat through the interminable funeral services. We had our quarrels, but at the end I guess he was coming around to like me after all. He wanted to do me a favor—at last.

One of the best clients of the bank, and a man whom Jim Eliot had dealt with for five years, was in the undyed cloth end of the textile business. To hear Max Siegal tell it, it seemed relatively simple: You bought up a lot of undyed cloth—often on credit—you figured what colors would be in fashion in the coming season, then you had your cloth dyed and resold at a profit. But it was a lot more complicated and dangerous than that. If you guessed wrong, you could be left with a few hundred thousand dollars' worth of cloth dyed the wrong colors. If that happened, you could hold it, paying storage costs, for years until the colors came in again; you could sell it at a loss; or you could have it redyed and hope to God that the cost of redying wouldn't put you out of business. Max Siegal had shown an uncanny knack of anticipating the fashionable colors, and the bank had been glad to give him short-term loans, since they had always been repaid before they became due.

"All right, Max," Jim Eliot said over the second luncheon martini, "there'll be no trouble over the loan. You know your credit's good. By the way, what's the color this year?"

"You thinking of taking a flyer, Jim? Forget it, you get paid regularly every two weeks. Bank your money."

"It's just so I can give Julia a little fashion preview."

"Well, I'm going forest green, one hundred per cent."

That night Eliot asked the Oracle the question and in the morning had the answer, "ex Tyre ad Caesarem." It was easy enough to read—"from Tyre to Caesar"—but it didn't make sense to him. He tried the library again, and this time learned in ten minutes that the city of Tyre manufactured a rare purple dye that was reserved for the Roman emperors.

Jim Eliot handled a few investment accounts, and the best of them was about $500,000 owned by an out-of-town spinster whom he rarely saw, an elderly woman who usually left matters entirely in the hands of the bank provided the returns remained at a level of better than five per cent. At any given time, about a tenth of the estate was in savings accounts waiting to be transferred into a more profitable investment; another tenth was in cash in a safe deposit box, as the old lady insisted. It was the first time for Eliot, and his hands were sweating as he took $10,000 from the safe deposit box.

With the cash, he bought $10,000 worth of undyed cloth and then arranged with a dyer for thirty days' credit. When he specified the color—royal purple—the man looked at him as if he wanted to cancel the agreement. But Eliot was beyond fear by now. "Purple," he said, "royal purple, all of it."

It was the next week when Max Siegal called him for lunch.

"Jim," he said, "I'm in real trouble. I've just seen the advances on Vogue, and this year it's purple, royal purple, and here I am stuck with forest green."

"You want another loan, Max?"

"It's too late. By the time I got the cloth dyed, the market would be flooded. Everybody would have switched. The green I could take a loss on and wait for next year; but if I could lay my hands on the purple, I could still break even."

"Suppose you could get your hands on about $10,000 worth of cloth that had been dyed royal purple?"

"I'd pay $25,000 and still make a good profit."

The next Monday, Jim Eliot cashed Siegal's check, paid the dyer, put the $10,000 back in the safe deposit box, beefed up his checking account with the balance. It was enough to pay off the more pressing debts, to retire much of the second mortgage, to pay up the loan at the personal finance company; but at the end of it he was still broke and the bills continued to roll in. One coup wasn't enough.

One of the most frequently traded stocks on the market was that of a gold mine in Asia, which fluctuated daily between a dollar and a dollar and a half. It was common knowledge on Wall Street that if ever the price of gold went up there would be a killing. Eliot asked the question of the Oracle and got the answer, this time in English, "The sea will be as full of gold as it is of fishes." There was something odd about the wording, and he waited. Next week he learned, knocking wood gratefully, of a new process of extracting gold from sea water which caused the price of gold to plummet all over the world.

He was not in a position where simply avoiding loss was enough. What he needed was a favorable answer, something he could act upon. The bills continued to pour in and the bank account was again down to about a hundred dollars. He was getting sick of obscure answers from the Oracle and answers in foreign languages. He wrote a note demanding clear messages in English. The next morning he got his reply: "Vox dei multas linguas habet [The voice of the god has many tongues]."

Very funny, Eliot thought; and that night he deliberately neglected the daily feeding. The bowl was put in its place, but he left it empty of milk and honey. He repeated his demand. He burned bay leaves. In the morning there was still no answer. It went on like that for a week. Occasionally, when he put his ear close to the doll-house, he could hear a scurrying around inside, and once, he thought, a small voice crying out. But there was no answer and he realized that something that could live two thousand years could fast for quite a long time.

Wednesday night was a bad one. He had forgotten to answer a letter from one of his accounts, and the indignant old gentleman had written directly to the president of the bank to complain. When he got home, there was a letter from Michael's school reminding him that tuition for the year was overdue. Then Julia, very handsome in new gold lamé stretch pants and leopard-skin pullover, looked up from the pitcher of martinis she was stirring, to tell him: that she had signed Pamela up for elocution lessons—"it's the braces, darling, they make her mumble"—and Charm School sessions; that the washing machine was broken down for good; that the Durkees next door had a new station wagon; that it was about time they got a full-time, live-in maid, even if they had to build a new room on the house; and, finally, that Pongo, the cat, needed a series of vitamin shots.

Eliot drank five martinis before dinner, and afterwards dozed in a chair. When he awoke, it was past one; Julia was already asleep. He ran cold water on his head and neck. Then he made himself a long scotch and sat thinking. After a while he headed for the cellar, with Pongo, the fat, sullen, castrated tomcat, under his arm, squirming and miaowing.

It was Julia's fancy occasionally to walk Pongo on a leash as if he were a dog. On his way to the cellar, Eliot rummaged in a kitchen drawer and found the ornate leash with its twisted silver wire threads, and attached it to the cat's rhinestone-studded collar. When he got close to the doll-house he tied the end of the leash securely to a pipe. Pongo sat there licking himself lazily.

Eliot went to the doll-house and reached along one side of the roof for the tiny catch that held it in place, and flipped it open. For a moment he remembered how old Wardell had warned him about looking inside the doll-house. Then he swung the roof over on its hinges. He pointed a standing lamp downward and peered carefully inside. In one of the small rooms off the atrium he could see what looked like a tiny old woman lying on a couch. She was about six inches long, and dressed in a dark robe. She turned her head and stared at Eliot, coldly and viciously.

He lifted her up, holding her firmly between curved middle finger and the two adjoining ones, as a fisherman holds an eel; but the wriggling was very feeble. Then he brought her close to the cat. For a moment he thought Pongo would break the leash. The cat strained forward, crying horribly with the need to put its teeth into the small, warm creature. Only a few inches separated the two. Eliot could see the frustrated cat's jaws move and hear the frenzied click-click-click of its teeth. He brought the doll-woman still closer, so close that he could feel the cat's breath and its sprayed spittle on the back of his hand. The little body held between his fingers was trembling weakly. Then Pongo began to howl. After a moment Eliot put the Oracle back on her couch and closed the roof of the doll-house. He left the message he had been leaving for many nights, but again he left the feeding bowl empty.

The next morning there was a message for him—"ask and it shall be answered."

That night he resumed feeding the Oracle.

The next day he borrowed $5000 from the same account he had used before, and that night he posed the question. There was no time now to wait for a stock to rise or a business opportunity; he was near bankruptcy; indeed, he would be bankrupt when all the bills came in. All he wanted was three winners; a three-horse parlay. Even if they were all the favorites, he would clear about $100,000, put back what he had borrowed, clean up the debts and be left with capital to use again.

In the morning the three names were there on the slip of paper. He copied them down carefully into a notebook: Sun-Ray, Snake-killer, and Apollo: first, second, and third races at the local track.

At the $100 window, he bought fifty tickets on Sun-Ray, and a few minutes later in his seat by the finish line, watched the odds drop from 5—3 down to 3—2. Even so, he thought, that would be $12,500 to bet on the second race. He did not even wait to see the finish. In the stretch, Sun-Ray was seven lengths ahead and pulling away. He was close to the front of the line of winners, cashing in their tickets.

There was a little delay in cashing his tickets. He was forced to give his name and address, and back it up with his operator's license—"for the tax boys," the cashier told him apologetically, counting out $12,500. Oh, Christ, Eliot thought, I forgot Mr. Big, there won't be much left after he's taken it off the top. Next time, he thought, next time, I'll stick to capital gains, once I get out of this hole.

At the $100 window, he put it all on Snake-killer. For a moment he wondered whether it would be safer to keep out the original $5000 he'd have to replace the next day; but there was no use playing it safe now, he was in too deep. Snake-killer he didn't like. No better than even money on the board, once his bet was down; but he had Apollo in the third at 10—1, and even when he put $25,000 down, the odds would at least stay at 4—1 or 5—1.

He didn't leave his position early during the second race. It was too close. He stood there, cold with fear, while Snake-killer and an unknown filly battled it out nose and nose. Then he saw the number go up on the board and realized Snake-killer had won. His breath came very fast, his eyes were blurred with sweat and he slumped in his seat.

Then Eliot sprinted to the pay-off window, feeling his heart pounding. There was not much time until the third and, for him, final race. Again he was asked to identify himself and quickly gave his name and address.

In a couple of minutes he was on his way to the $100 window, with $25,000 to bet on Apollo, and was soon pushing a huge strip of tickets into his pockets. Again, for half a second, he kicked himself mentally for not holding out the original $5000 he had taken from the account. Tomorrow morning it goes back, he told himself, first thing tomorrow. He looked up at the odds on the board: even after his huge bet, still 5—1; $125,000 for him in about five minutes.

This time he didn't even go out to the track, but stood there by the cashiers watching the board and waiting for the number 11, Apollo, to go up. It was very fast. He heard the roar that greeted the start, then a rising uneven crescendo of sound as the horses disappeared around the turn; then the final roar as they came into the home-stretch; then something approaching silence as number 11 went up. Eliot turned from the board and walked rapidly to the cashier, holding out his tickets. Right at the track, he thought, there's a branch of my bank. I'll pay it right in, except for the $5000. But, by God, my own separate savings account. Nothing Julia can get at.

"Just a minute," the cashier said. "There's a foul claim against Apollo going up."

Eliot smiled confidently. The smile was still on his face when the cashier turned to him again.

"Your bad day, buddy. They just disqualified Apollo. Better tear up them tickets."

Eliot looked around and saw the 11 coming down, and number 4, the place-horse, going up in its stead.

"They can't," he said, "she told me . . ."

"Tough, buddy; come on; out of line; they're waiting."

He stumbled aside, looking for a long time at the board, hoping that in some impossible way there could be an appeal against the appeal. But nothing happened, and after a while he went home.

On the train he looked again at the whole message. "These will run the fastest tomorrow: Sun-Ray, Snake-killer, Apollo." Oh, Christ, he thought, the bitch tricked me again—"run the fastest," nothing about fouling. This time I'll let the cat play with her a little.

When he got home there was no one there. Only a note from Julia. "Pamela is at a pajama party at the Evans'. I'm going to the movies. Food in refrigerator. Pongo is in the cellar, be sure to put him out."

He sat drinking rapidly. Five thousand dollars short. There was no way to raise it. Two mortgages on the house; no equity in the cars; he had already borrowed on his life insurance. And one of these days old Miss Winston would suddenly turn up at the bank, as she always did, and count the money in the safe deposit box. Or the examiners would make their check. If only there were some way to be sure with that lousy Oracle. There's still a lot left in the safe deposit box. I could try it again. I won't get any longer sentence if they catch me. This time, he said, I'll really starve her out; this time I'll let the cat have her for a while till she calls out to me for help.

He was quite drunk when he remembered Julia's note and stumbled down to the cellar to let the cat out. At first he didn't really notice Pongo over in a corner of his study; he only took note that the cat was there, glancing rapidly out of one corner of his eye, as he went quickly to the doll-house, holding the cat's leash in one hand.

He looked at the doll-house. The entrance was a ruin. The thin wood and papier-mâché had been torn aside, and he could see deep scratch marks around the pool where claws had searched. He opened the catch quickly and swung back the roof. The couch on which the Oracle had rested was on its side in a corner of the little room, in pieces. There was no one inside the doll-house.

In the far corner Pongo purred ecstatically. Eliot came slowly toward the cat, as it crouched down defensively over something in its two paws that looked like a crumpled piece of dark cloth. Eliot brought the leash down on the cat's shoulders savagely, watching it scurry away, leaving whatever it had been playing with.

He picked it up. It was only a torn tube of black cloth with something crushed inside. If he had not felt the dark stains on the garment and held his finger up to the light to see the little smear of blood on it, he would have thought it was simply a headless doll.

Julia, among her other traits, suffered from an exaggerated fear of burglars; but once Eliot had bought the stubby .38 Bankers Special revolver, she had made him keep it, not in the night table by his bed—she was equally terrified of guns—but in a desk drawer in his cellar study, locked.

The key was on his key ring, and he opened the drawer quickly and took out the revolver, weighing it in his hand. He went over to the doll-house swinging the revolver. He looked inside once more on the wild, impossible chance that the Oracle was still there, that the old woman had somehow escaped the cat. But the doll-house was empty, or rather, almost empty; because there was a scrap of paper in one corner of the pool.

He picked it up. When shall I die, he thought, and read the last message he was to get—"ille die [today]."

When the revolver went off in the enclosed cellar, it was as loud as artillery.

The movie that Julia saw was a double feature. Neither picture was much good, but she was thrifty in small things and once she had paid for her ticket would sit through hours of clumsy triteness. When she got back to the house she parked the car and came in through the carport entrance to the kitchen. It looked as though a chef had gone crazy. On the shelves, boxes and bottles were knocked on their sides. The spice cabinet hanging on the wall was askew, and on the kitchen table an opened bottle of bay leaves spilled out its aromatic contents.

She cleaned them up mechanically, almost without thought, then she looked for her husband. He was not in the living room or the bedroom, so at last she looked for him in the cellar study. When she entered the cellar, the lights were off in the main section but she could see a faint yellow glow escaping under the study door. She switched on the overhead light.

Pongo the cat was on the floor, stiff and ungainly with a pool of blood around him. For a moment she wondered what had happened; then she saw the revolver tossed on the floor by the dead cat's ruined head. She went up to the door of the study. All she could hear was a low monotonous repetition of words she could not understand. She opened the door slowly and carefully.

The first thing that struck her was the harshly aromatic smell of burning bay leaves and the curl of blue-gray smoke from a little copper ash tray.

Her husband was kneeling in front of a large doll-house at one end of the room. His left hand held a small wooden bowl, and incongruously, in his right hand was a half-filled milk bottle that he was pouring into the bowl. She called to him sharply, but he did not answer. Then she went forward. The top of the doll-house was raised. She had never looked inside it before so she craned forward eagerly. All she could see was a courtyard with an empty pool, and several small rooms surrounding it. In one of them there seemed to be a little antique couch, with something lying on it. After a moment Eliot turned to look at her blindly. Then he reached into the doll-house and took from the couch what looked like a tiny rag doll. He began to talk to it, crooning in a language she did not know, ignoring her completely. He was still on his knees crooning when she went upstairs, and he had not moved much later when the ambulance arrived.

 

Afterword:

 

To re-create the steps that lead to the writing of a short story normally requires something close to total recall, unless you are one of those very methodical writers who make a point of jotting story ideas, development and progress down in a notebook. In the case of "The Doll-House," however, I do have a pretty clear recollection of how it got started.

I was with my son Brian, then two years old, and we were looking at the fantastic doll-house in the old Smithsonian building here. Brian was fascinated by some of the puppets in the old doll-house, and asked whether they were "real people," did they move around, and so on. I thought of M. R. James's story of the eighteenth-century doll-house where the puppets did come alive after midnight, in a very gruesome way; but obviously I couldn't re-use that for an idea. For no particular reason, I then thought of the Palazzo Vettii at Pompeii, and how that handsome Roman summerhouse would make a wonderful doll-house. Then, being mentally in the Naples area, I remembered the story in Petronius about the Oracle who had been somehow captured and imprisoned in a bottle. Then I thought of my son's question again, and the various avenues of thought became enmeshed with each other and took on a rough shape and pattern. (All this took place in about thirty seconds.) On the way home I began thinking more deliberately and systematically; and by the time I got there I had a story idea pretty well roughed out in my head. This is the way that I find I have to work most stories out—using every stimulus and every scrap of time available; because I have always had a full-time job and have written for pleasure, relaxation, because I find it hard not to write.

The danger part of the "dangerous vision" in my story is really there from the beginning. Jim Eliot is a would-be arriviste who has not arrived, someone with a great future behind him. He would like to be "upwardly mobile," as the sociologists put it, in fact as well as in temperament. He has married upwardly, he is living in a very expensive exurb in the hopes that his income will someday reach his way of life—just as some primitive cultures believe that acting out the effects that follow a cause will actually bring about the cause: wet yourself and it will rain. He still has the dangerous vision that guides his life—the vision of the Land of Pelf, the long green, the crisp bills falling gently from the money trees like dead leaves; and meanwhile, even before he gets the doll-house, he is acting as though the vision were true. And what he himself fails to spend, his wife takes care of. He is extended; in debt; juggling creditors; stretched thin; on a tightrope; near a breakdown. This is why he is willing to believe the unbelievable. This is why he is avid to accept a dubious gift from a dying man who is obviously his enemy. And this is why even a setback or two—plain warnings—do not deter him: he still has that dangerous vision of the perfect gimmick that will open the doors to the U. S. Mint.

"It is the custom of the gods," Caesar said to King Ariovistus, "to raise men high, so that their fall will be all the greater." Jim Eliot doesn't even get all that high, except for a matter of minutes; but his fall is just as great.

Most of my novels and short stories, I find, revolve a great deal around money, sex and status. This particular one is about money and the various symbols that men exchange it for; about easy money and the eternally dangerous vision—that there is somewhere, just around the corner, in another country, another time, another dimension, a fool-proof way to get it.