Small World Read online

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of my sister Catherine Graves and her husband, David; of Chriss Lavin, of the offices of then-Senator Edmund Muskie; of my sister Stephanie Leonard; of Kirby McCauley and his sister Kay McCauley; and of my husband, Stephen King.

  The Dalton Institute also has my eternal gratitude for the kind offices of its staff.

  In all his years working in the White House, all his years of brothering, fathering, stepfathering, uncle-ing, and grandfathering, she was, Leonard Jakobs thought, the unhappiest child he’d ever encountered. Like so many of the rich and white, the child didn’t seem to know how to be happy. True, the mama drank, secretlike, and the daddy didn’t have no time for her, but so what? It wasn’t only rich' and white didn’t love their children enough. But some children got along, and some didn’t.

  This one tugged at him. She was a little thing, cutelike, but never going to be no true-heart beauty. No, she looked like her daddy, and sooner or later, probably when she was an old woman, the daddy in her would come out. Still, she was tough and willful, like him, and that wasn’t all bad. A little tough went a long way in this world.

  It was the hopelessness that caught him. The sense that this poor thing was already lost, almost before she began, like some skinny, stupid puppy that never gets enough milk from mama, but too many kicks, and likely gets runned over by a big truck first time it ventures out.

  There was little enough he could do for her: kid with her, make her smile when he met her, in the course of his work. And he could do for her what he’d done for a dozen little girls over the years: use the Lord’s gifts to him to make her a remembrance of her time here in this great house.

  He never had built anything just like this before, so he read up on it in one of the Historical Association guidebooks that even had old plans in it. One passage he read over and over:

  It is a serene eighteenth-century vision, founded in the then-visible-and-divine order of the universe. The square of the building is broken symmetrically by the porticoes: the sensual bow of the south, a classically severe pedimented porch on the north, both composed with smooth, authoritarian columns. The detail that disturbs the severe lines is, in turn, purified by the color white that age softens into cream. It is a materialized dream of the republic.

  The fancy words tried hard to catch, he thought, his own feeling that it was special, unique, almost living. It was a sad place; no one’s home, for all the folks that lived there for their time. The men who had died under its symbolic roof numbered eight; he was not the only long-time staffer who felt their chill presence in its rooms.

  Through all the months of patient labor before the child’s birthday, he considered these matters and leaned upon the Lord. This house, this image of the Greater Mansion, would always bring joy, pleasure, and delight to the hearts of the children who played with it, for it is those things that the Lord meant the children to learn from their play.

  In the end, the Lord humbled him for his pride in the work and made the child turn her face away from the dollhouse he had built for her. Leonard Jakobs beat away his disappointment, resolving that if the child, in her miserableness, reject his gift, he would not reject the Lord’s. Perhaps, in time, the Lord would bless His daughter Dorothy, as He had blessed him.

  WHATEVER HAPPENED TO PRINCESS DOLLY?

  . . . disappeared last Tuesday. Sartoris’s once-notorious nude portrait of a presidential daughter at age fifteen had become a nostalgic snapshot from the family album. . . .

  3.28.80 —VIPerpetrations, VIP

  Bells chimed a soft release. Roger Tinker was alone in a threesided cell, one element in a honeycomb maze of partitions that displayed the museum’s collection. The light falling from the skylights had the honeyed richness of late afternoon. Dust motes swam through diffuse golden streams and vanished into the angled shadows of the walls. The whisperings of departing visitors and the ‘good-days’ of the staff intruded on the ecclesiastical silence like muffled prayers.

  Roger, clutching his pocketbook in both sweaty hands, breathed his own mildly blasphemous prayer of thanks. He had srared at the painting of the girl so long that her image had dissolved before him into many acid blotches. Moisture trickled in his armpits, and they itched unmercifully.

  He stepped back a few paces, pretending to look at other pictures. In high heels that were still a little stiff and pinched at the instep, he felt like he was walking in space. He wobbled to rest in front of an enormous gilt frame that ludicrously surrounded about four square inches of a rudimentary portrait of a dog. Roger was certain that he could do a better dog himself, with a cotton swab between his piggies.

  The air snuck up his unshaven legs like the mouse that ran up the clock. He shivered. Nylon whispered between his legs as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He bit his lips, tasted !ipstick. and fretted about how it was wearing. Shit. He gave himself a mental shake.

  The bells chimed again. A quick glance around the ceiling confirmed that no cameras had sprouted there since last he checked five minutes ago. A handful of guards, white-haired, with big bellies encased in scarlet uniforms, and looking like a troop of off-season Santa Clauses, drifted through the maze one last time.

  Their attentions settled on the main exit and their wrist watches.

  Roger moved casually back to his place of vigil in front of Princess Dolly. He stared into the heavy-lidded eyes again. The mouth was wide but ungenerous. Thin-lipped. Suddenly, Roger saw the painting with the painter’s eyes. The bottom dropped out of his stomach. He closed his eyes in a spasm of instinctive self-defense. Too late. He felt himself stiffening.

  The bells broke the trance. Third time, closing time. And Roger’s time. He sucked in a deep, shaky breath. Raising his handbag to his waist, he groped inside, as if for a tissue.

  ‘Cheese,’ he whispered.

  It had been a shock the first time he stood before his mother’s full-length mirror. He didn’t look like Roger Tinker in drag. He was something else, someone else. A woman. Not beautiful, just an ordinary, rather masculine, dowdy matron. But still, a woman. It was embarrassing, even after several times, to glimpse his own reflection. And yet he had to look, he had to see this other Roger.

  An hour after stealing the painting, he stood before the mirror again. He was still excited. But his mother would be home soon and he had to be himself again. He stripped off the jacket and long skirt, the blouse and slip. He folded them carefully into the box from the department store where he’d purchased them.

  The saleslady in the dress department had been thin, elderly, and very eager to make a sale. There had been no pretense in Roger’s awkwardness. He had let her cluck and soothe and admire him for being so thoughtful to his lucky mum. And wouldn’t she just love this three-piece suit, so flattering to an older woman’s figure, and so chic, too. Roger had gone away grinning, with his dress box under his damp armpit, having been maneuvered by the old doll into buying just what he wanted.

  Briefly, he admired his artificial bosom in the glass. His own foam creation. Trying on his mother’s brassiere, he had discovered that getting in and out of the back-opening sort was impossible. Either there was some trick to it, some secret of the sisterhood, or women had an extra joint in their arms. Finding a front-opener had been a huge relief.

  He kicked off the high heels and skinned out of the pantyhose. At last he was down to the blue nylon panties with Monday written on the left hip in pink thread. It wasn’t actually Monday; it was Tuesday. But Roger like the blue ones better than the Tuesday panties (which were yellow with orange script), and somehow Roger’s mother had never thought to tell him it was bad luck to wear the wrong day’s panties.

  After wearing them, he was sure women
must think about their crotches all the time. No wonder none of them could add and subtract without a calculator. The first time, he’d gotten a terrific boner. He’d gotten used to the sensation after a while, but the slide of nylon over his sensitive parts was always there—a secret skin of excitement.

  The young and very poised woman in the lingerie department had been used to embarrassed men out of their element. She had batted heavily made-up eyes at Roger, and her long slim fingers with their garishly painted nails had slipped across all the silky things with a sound that had made him shiver. She had smiled knowingly at him, and he had worried, with guilty excitement a knot in his belly, that she knew.

  He never should have bought the whole week’s worth. It was a nervous impulse, a crazy idea that it was more plausible he was buying for a mythical wife or girl friend if he purchased the package instead of just one pair. So now he had white ones, with Sunday in pink; and pink ones, with Wednesday in yellow; he had Thursday panties in green, with white lettering; and Friday, black with red script; and the reverse, black letters on red, for Saturday. The whole idea of changing drawers every day was so female and sort of cute, like writing the days of the week daintily on each pair. Perhaps it helped them make up their minds.

  The pepper-and-salt wig went into its own box. It gave him a headache to wear it and, he had to giggle, it wasn’t him anyway. Hadn’t the saleswoman at the wig salon said just that, very sarcastically? Roger had seen right away she didn’t believe word one of his costume-party cover story. She had taken one look at him and apparently put him down as someone of questionable sexual tendencies who probably stir-fried small boys for lunch. Roger had suffered her fuming disapproval until he’d gotten what he wanted.

  His mother liked to say, in reference to the romantic tangles on the afternoon soap operas, that ‘faint heart never won fair maid.’ Roger had told himself that ‘faint heart never made one fair, either,’ and had minced wickedly out, winking broadly at the old r'ltch, as she turned a very satisfactory geranium shade.

  The make-up took a lot of scrubbing off. It smudged around the eyes and stained his lips a ghostly red. He couldn’t afford to have his mother notice something like that. She’d pee herself. He grinned at the thought of his mother discovering his rubber titties and his panty collection.

  At last his face was clean, if a little raw around the eyes and lips. It was disconcertingly bare-looking. He threw the old make-up and the soiled cotton balls he’d used for clean-up into a paper bag, and tucked them into the wig box, along with the high heels and pantyhose.

  His own clothes were heaped untidily on his mother’s bed. Fishing out his skivvies, he was halfway into them when he realized he was still wearing the blue Monday panties. Suddenly hot all over, he kicked off his shorts angrily. He hauled too vigorously at the panties, caught them around one foot, and danced briefly like a one-legged bird to keep his balance. It was infuriating, being tripped up in a shred of nylon. Once out of them, he crumpled them up and stuffed them into the dress box.

  With an almost physical sense of relief, he put on his own worn cords and Superman T-shirt. He spirited the illicit clothing to a locked cupboard in his cellar study. There was just time for a quick check of his mother’s bedroom and the bathroom, to make sure he’d left nothing incriminating, when he heard her car in the drive. He turned on the television in the living room and shuffled into the kitchen to greet her when she opened the back door.

  ‘Hey, Mom,’ he said, and took the bag of groceries from her.

  She presented one soft, peachy, sweet-smelling cheek to him. ‘Well,’ she said gaily, ‘aren’t we bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?’

  Roger kissed her and dumped the groceries on the dinette table.

  ‘Sure,’ he agreed, opening the refrigerator, ‘sure we are.’

  After supper, Roger settled in front of the television. His mother swapped her girdle for a comfortable housecoat and joined him. TTiey sat in easy silence, fixed in the blue light of the television that was like some unearthly analogue of amber.

  Roger paid the minimum necessary attention to the nightly news. The world was going to hell in a handbasket. It had been ail his life. No real wonder, so far as he could see. It was a matter of majority vote, wasn’t it? The greater part of the population might as well be dead as not.

  The girl who had waited on him in the discount drugstore had been one of the zombies. He needn’t have bothered with his neat list, ending in Tampax for the sake of verisimilitude. She’d taken back all her marbles and quit the game before Roger ever got there. She had looked at him, at everybody who came in, as if they were already ghosts. If his little list was a lie by omission, so was her life. No matter to her if he were a child-molesting pervert, or the president, or Jesus Christ on roller skates; she had taken the fun out of it.

  The last item on the local news broke into his sour recollection. It seemed there had been, that very afternoon, another in a series of art thefts. The newscaster was enormously cheerful about it, as if he personally had pulled off what he called ‘another shocking heist.’ A famous painting by Leighton Sartoris, considered by many to be the greatest of the world’s living artists, had been discovered missing from the Appt Collection, housed at the Feero Museum of Modern Art. No one had witnessed the heist or had seen the perpetrators. The police described the museum security as ‘lax,’ and said the curator of the museum valued the work at three-quarters of a million dollars. It was, of course, Sartoris’s 1950 portrait of Dorothy Hardesty Douglas, the daughter of then-President Michael Hardesty.

  Roger’s mother tut-tutted at the valuation. She tut-tutted quite a lot during the news. Roger didn’t pay any attention anymore. When somebody tuts the same for a famine as they do for an act of larceny, Roger refused to take their tutting seriously. He sat back, savoring the word ‘heist.’

  Up to that point, he had thought of it as a caper. The truth of it was that the hardest part had been the shopping. It had taken two days to find the right shoes and handbag. A long-haired shoe-store clerk had been amused with his costume-party story and rummaged happily in the storeroom to find a pair of black patent-leather pumps that would fit Roger’s short, wide feet. The pocketbook had been a piece of luck, a treasure hidden underneath a heap of onsale, long-out-of-fashion handbags in a discount store.

  His feet had hurt so much he couldn’t face trying the entire costume on all at once. While he had soaked his dogs and watched game shows, Roger had reflected on what he’d learned. Women were tougher than he ever imagined; they went out into the incredible chaos of the retail universe, got what they wanted, and made it back alive. Apparently they even liked it.

  And then he had tried on his new wardrobe. Suddenly, seeing nimself in the mirror, he had known there was more to it, more than just clothes and make-up. There was a stance, a way of holding the body, the expression on the face, a way of moving. The whole idea of disguising himself as a woman was revealed as

  dangerously complex.

  He had felt hopelessly ignorant. Clothing had always been merely clothing, something to cover up the places where God’s taste had fallen down. And women, well, there was his mother, and that was the extent of his relations with the other half. Still, he had been pit-deep in the project, his caper, and onward he must go, driven by curiosity and perverse excitement.

  When the news was over, Roger fled to his cellar hideaway. His mother had given over the cellar to him when he was fifteen. She had been downstairs but twice in the entire thirty years she’d lived in the house. The last time she peeked into the cellar it was a dank cement dungeon festooned with cobwebs and smelling of mildew and mouse poop. When Roger had asked for a place of his own, she took it to mean something in the nature of a clubhouse, crude and masculine and littered with comic books and overflowing ashtrays. She had been rather proud of her tolerant motherhood when she consented.

  It had become much more than a rec room. The stairs were lit, as they always had been, by a single low-wattage bulb su
spended by its own wiring from the ceiling. From the landing at the top of the stairs, the cellar looked much as it had fifteen years ago. Beyond the dim circle of light thrown by the dusty old fixture was a plywood partition. Roger had painted it a dingy brown to encourage the general impression of gloom and decay. He had hung a sturdy door at the darkest end and installed a good lock, to which he alone possessed the key. On the door, he had long ago hand-stenciled the legend Fortress of Solitude.

  Beyond that first partition, he had put up a second. One side was lined with unfinished floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. They held Roger’s collection of science fiction pulps, and his models of the Enterprise, a shuttlecraft, and a Klingon raider. Between the two partitions was the room that Roger thought of as his study.

  He had furnished the room with ratty garage-sale furniture: a monstrous chair that leaked stuffing from the wounds in its tobacco-scented horsehair upholstery; a thickly painted and chipped end table; a standing lamp ugly enough to paralyze anyone foolish enough to look directly at it. His mother had contributed an orange hassock that she had once stored her confession magazines in. A melted patch of its vinyl skin had been scabbed over in adhesive tape after she absently rested a hot sheet of brownies on it while changing the television channel one day. Roger had put it to work storing the kind of books she didn’t know

  he read.

  Roger had constructed his workshop on the other side of the second partition. It was remarkably and curiously furnished, mostly at the unwitting expense of the taxpayer. There were a number of locked cupboards containing interesting items, including Roger’s contraband wardrobe.

  Behind one door was Roger’s home-made computer, powered by a free and illegal tap into a neighborhood transformer, and connected by an equally illicit telephone patch to the bulk of the government’s computer network and to half the ba'nk computers in California. It would have been easy to tap the banks’ computers, but it was Roger’s conviction that it was also an easy way to get caught. It wasn’t conscience, but the odds, that made him prefer alternative financing for his researches.