The Sundial (18 page)

On the third floor of the big house, near the end of the right wing, was a great room which Mrs. Halloran had never visited, although she surely knew of its existence. It occupied almost all of the top floor of the right wing, sharing it only with the little room which the first Mr. Halloran had wanted to make into an observatory from which he could watch the stars. Because the big house was so extremely big the great room on the third floor was rarely remembered, and visited only by Aunt Fanny; in it were the worldly possessions of the first Mrs. Halloran—not the diamonds which Aunt Fanny wore, nor the satin sheets and tiny golden chairs from the bedroom where she died, but the solid, well-chosen, and real possessions which the first Mrs. Halloran had known she owned, and had meant when, dying, she whispered, “Take care of my things,” to her husband.

When the first Mr. Halloran brought his wife and his two small children to live in the big house he had built for them, he brought them from a bleak and uncomfortable top-floor apartment in a two-family house, and he made the change for them without a very adequate preparation. The first Mrs. Halloran died without ever seeing the greater part of the furnishings in the big house, and during the long days of her illness took great consolation from the knowledge that her real possessions were safely stored away in an attic room somewhere above her head.

Aunt Fanny, who loved the big house, had always known somehow that the core of it was in the big attic room. Over a period of years she had, quite by herself, reestablished the four-room apartment where she had been born; the attic room was easily large enough for the furniture to be set in order, and Aunt Fanny had been astonished at her own memories, which set furniture and even ornaments into a pattern almost agonizing in its growing familiarity.

The great ugly living room suite, patterned in dark red and blue brocade, which had been a source of such enormous pride to the first Mrs. Halloran, Aunt Fanny had set up first, the heavy couch facing the two deep armchairs. This furniture had been built to endure, and endure it would. Between the couch and the armchairs was crammed an imitation-mahogany bric-a-brac table, and on that—Aunt Fanny had gone into carefully packed cartons, dislodging mothballs—were a dark blue imitation velvet fringed tablecover, a small music box which had been a candy dish, and played the first phrases of “Barcarolle,” a model of the Statue of Liberty, since the first Mrs. Halloran had come to New York on her honeymoon, and a photograph album bound in blue imitation leather. Aunt Fanny had turned the pages of the photograph album, looking in some bewilderment at the yellowed snapshots of the first Mrs. Halloran as a girl, somehow ludicrously innocent, in middy blouse and spreading tie; as a bride, looking up at an unrecognizable tall man; as a mother, holding a pig-faced creature which might have been either her son Richard or her daughter Frances; in company with friends who had by now very likely forgotten even her name. In these pictures Aunt Fanny could not find her mother, who was dead, but only a girl in a book, whose story was tragically swift, from girl to wife to mother, and dull, since nothing had ever happened to her from the day she had her picture taken laughing and long-haired in the middy blouse, to the day when, photographed for the last time before the high steps of the two-family house, she smiled uneasily into the camera, her face barely discernible under the odd hat. Aunt Fanny sometimes wondered, turning the pages of the photograph album, how much her mother had ever realized of that life which went by so quickly; had she known, standing for her picture in front of the house where she had lived with her husband, had she known that it was for the last time, that no furniture record of her would exist? Had she known earlier, then, in the middy blouse, that she was going to die? Equally, then, did the faces which looked out from the other pages of the album, the faces of small Franceses and Richards, hold also that sweet indefinable reassuring knowledge? Did the Richard in wide collar and velvet trousers know that
he
was going to die?—he knew it now. Could the truth be read in the tiny Frances who sat, toothless, on a blanket in the sun? “Some day I will be with my mother,” Aunt Fanny would think, turning the pages, “I am with her in this book, no one can separate us
here
. Some day we will all be together again.” The last pages of the book were empty, because the album had been packed carefully away years ago with everything else in the small apartment and had been stored in the attic of the big house; “Is my furniture all right?” the first Mrs. Halloran had asked the maids, “are you taking good care of my furniture? Are all my boxes of things in a safe place?” Nothing from the attic room had ever been permitted out into the big house; the four-room apartment was intact.

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 mother 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.”