by Al Ewing
Those who remembered Henry from before he left for boot camp in 1941 remembered a smiling, elfin young man with a mop of dark hair and a beautifully trimmed moustache, who was engaged to be married to one of the prettier girls of Boston’s bacon-slicing industry and who, having read his share of Steinbeck and just enough Henry Miller to be interesting, had some airy dreams of making a living in the writing line – not that they kept him from putting in his full share at the bank. Everyone who knew him agreed that you just couldn’t find a more appealing fellow in the whole darned state.
This was not a description of the Henry Dalrymple who came back.
That man was scrawny, his dark hair lank over his forehead, his once-trim moustache now like a huge, hairy caterpillar clinging to his top lip. His eyes were sunken, with a look in them that could freeze lava at the break of noon, and while he was still engaged to the pretty bacon-slicer, and they even married the month after his liberation from the camp, it was generally felt that the divorce that came less than six months after was a blessing for all concerned.
As for his writing ambitions, they had atrophied. In the spring of 1948, after spending one year shut up in a bed-sitting room with only himself and the occasional well-meaning neighbour for company, he wrote his one and only short story, which was rejected and returned – before the ink on the envelope was fully dry, to hear him tell it – by Collier’s Weekly.
It is reproduced here in full.
THE DOLL-PARTY,
or, THE LIFE AND DEATH
OF A DOLL
By H. R. Dalrymple
I SUPPOSE, STRICTLY speaking, it began with the Sutherlands.
By which I mean Margaret Sutherland, who was as fat and sweet as a gingerbread woman and did nothing much of anything with her time apart from find innocent drawing-rooms and force herself on them, and her husband Roger, who was a dentist and who smiled like an advertisement on paper rather than a man of flesh and blood.
It began with the Sutherlands. The Sutherlands who had been firm friends of my ex-wife, the Sutherlands who found me dull and listless but still felt it their duty to invite themselves into my home whenever possible, the Sutherlands who mercilessly invaded everything from a poker night to a cocktail evening, the Sutherlands who roamed and poked around my house like detectives looking for the vital clue while everyone else was content to sit and sip their Manhattans in peace. The Sutherlands, the Sutherlands, God, how I hated the Sutherlands.
And God, how I needed them. They were the pin holding the grenade together. They came to my poker nights, my cocktail evenings, because of... charity? Curiosity? Whatever damned reason drives people like that to haunt the lives of the less fortunate. But the others came because Maggie and Roger were there, and Maggie and Roger made it a party and not a wake. Without Maggie and Roger, those Sutherlands, those wonderful smiling gingerbread Sutherlands, why, you’d only have me. Me and my long silences, my stumbling words, my faraway look. Me, the man who drove his wife away. Me, bitter. Me, alone.
I didn’t want to be alone. I needed company. And so, I needed the Sutherlands.
And, strictly speaking, it began when the Sutherlands poked their noses into a dusty corner of my bookshelves that they had previously left unpoked – and found the toy soldier.
“Oh!” squealed Margaret. “Oh, isn’t this simply marvellous! How darling! What a dear little man!”
The toy soldier was a smart fellow of wood and red varnish that my wife had found in a thrift store along with a ballerina in a box. Both had found their way to one of the bookshelves and sat there, undisturbed, with nothing to do but look pretty and set off the drabness of the room, until Margaret Sutherland had decided to pick the soldier up and make him speak.
“Hel-lo!” she boomed heartily, in a deep voice that did not become her. “I’m a redcoat, on my way to war! Who’ll march with me?” She wiggled him to and fro, making him march in place, and I noticed my other guests – the Rourkes, the Fullers, both couples in their way as noxious as the Sutherlands, but neither quite as loud – beginning to smile. Of course they did! Margaret’s baby-voice and childish manner were meat and drink to them. I found myself checking my watch, conscious of how early the evening was, how much of it was left. A part of me decided to dash my whisky-glass to the floor, to stand up and grab the damned doll and snap it in two, to turf these overgrown children out of my home once and for all and have the night for myself.
A larger part sat still, saying nothing.
Roger, always ready to follow his wife into a lark, made his voice high and shrill. “I will!” He was holding the ballerina in her box. I steeled myself, but the Rourkes and the Fullers only smiled wider, each couple catching the eye of the other, chuckling and giggling as the Sutherlands played with their dolls.
“Why, what a beauty you are!” said the toy soldier, in Margaret’s deep toy voice, sickly as molasses.
“And what a fine handsome soldier you are!” keened the ballerina, as Roger did his best to out-sugar his wife.
And on it went like that, the wood soldier and the tin ballerina carrying on a strange sort of courtship as the Rourkes clapped and the Fullers laughed and I sank lower into my chair and into my glass and prayed for it all to end. But still, I had nothing to say. I was too afraid of the silence that would come when the Sutherlands and the Rourkes and the Fullers had left, and I had nobody to replace them.
“Oh, isn’t this such fun!” cried Margaret, shaking the toy soldier merrily about, and everyone agreed that it was fun, such fun, because it would be a poor sport who said ‘no’ to Margaret Sutherland. And then, sensing her moment, she dropped the bombshell: “Let’s all of us find a doll, and tomorrow evening we can all meet up and have a doll’s tea-party, and our dolls can all meet one another and say hello! Oh, do let’s! It’ll be such, such fun!”
One of Margaret Sutherland’s favourite things – aside from herself and the rapt attention of guests, be they hers or anyone else’s – was the joy of suggesting things that would be ‘such, such fun’ and having people scurry to carry them out. Roger, of course, was the first to agree that a tea party for dolls, officiated by grown men and women, would be ‘such fun,’ and then Marlene Fuller boasted that she had a figurine of a shepherd-boy upon her mantel that would be simply perfect, and her husband sucked on his pipe and chuckled that somewhere he had a swim trophy that would serve, and after that the dolls had the majority and our fates were sealed.
I was not asked which doll I would bring. I sensed that I was not a part of this, that I was not invited in any real sense, that I was freed from all obligation to take part in this grim suburban ritual. Naturally, I exalted. Even when Margaret and Roger left, taking away the toy soldier and the boxed ballerina as though they weren’t stealing my meagre belongings from my home, I felt a surge of happiness rush through me. Whatever sickly horrors would emerge the next night, I would not be there to see them. I had long since put away childish things, and – now that the toy soldier had been taken from me to a new home – there was nothing in my house that could be called a doll.
No doll meant no doll-party. I was free.
And yet, and yet...
When midnight came, and the noise of the clock echoed through my almost empty house, it found me whittling a stout piece of firewood into the figure of a man. And as the knife cut deep, I found myself whispering to the wood, speaking first high, then low – struggling to find my doll a voice.
IT WAS MICHAEL Rourke who opened the door, and the fall of his face as he beheld me confirmed that I had come to the feast as a spectre, as unbidden and unwelcome as Banquo’s ghost. I had suspected as much, and now a dark part of me, my inner imp, was filled with a perverse, gleeful joy at the knowledge, and in greeting I lifted up the wooden figure I’d carved the night before for his inspection.
“Look, Mike, look!” The smile felt savage on my face, like the anarchist readying the bomb. “Why, I’ve brought a friend for the party!”
“Why, so you have!” M
ike made the best attempt he had in him to be jovial. But his ruddy cheeks had turned deathly pale at the sight of my friend the doll, and I cannot now find it in myself to blame him.
For in those small, dark hours in the dead of the night, as my hand had worked the blade and carved the wood, it had been guided by that inner imp, that savage anarchist, that mean and ugly quarter of my spirit which I had brought back with me from what my wife called ‘my time away’. That time which had driven out the joy from my life, and drove her out in turn. My ugly souvenir of darker times.
I tell myself now that I tried from my heart to instil my little friend with joy, and hope, and happiness, if only from a need to be loved and accepted by the Sutherlands and their hangers-on. But perhaps in that dark night I was more honest. Or perhaps the knife knew me better than I did myself, and had whittled accordingly.
My friend the doll was a horror.
To begin with he had been made overly tall and thin, his legs so skinny that I had to hold him gingerly by the waist, lest I should squeeze too hard and snap them off. His wooden arms, meanwhile, hung limp at his sides as if dislocated, broken by some terrible wound. In my worst folly, I’d attempted to carve him a little jacket, so he would at least be smartly dressed for the occasion – but the knife had had its way, and the macabre slashes I’d left on his torso suggested nothing so much as a suit of rags hanging from a condemned man.
All such indignities my friend the doll could have borne with equanimity. Yes, even a smile! For I had meant him to be a cheery fellow, despite his many hardships. But the knife had shifted at the last, and the slash of his mouth was sour and cruel, his eyes hollow, blank dots, and it was this hateful expression more than anything which had turned Michael Rourke so pale.
I saw his expression, and the inner imp inside me flexed again – and so I spoke for the first time as the doll.
How to describe it? How to describe that awful voice? It was my voice, that I admit freely. I am not such a fool as to believe that any animating spirit but my own possessed that hunk of mis-carved wood. It was my voice, but warped and black and twisted, in the way I’d heard the voices of my friends in their hospice-beds warp and crack as they begged, from faces without jaws, bodies without limbs, begged for the nurse, for their mothers, for death.
To speak for my friend, I drew my lips back and back, revealing my yellow teeth in a fearful grimace like Death’s own, my head tilting to the side as though I were asleep or dead myself. And then I spoke through my teeth, from low in my throat, and the result was a keening whine, a banshee sort of voice, a voice from an unmarked grave on a muddy field.
“HELLO MISTER ROUR-R-RKE,” my friend the doll said in his awful cracking croak, as I stood like a living corpse, waggling him two and fro in my grip. Mike Rourke had left the porcelain teddy bear that he’d bought that afternoon, for a full eight dollars, on one of the Sutherlands’ end-tables, so all he could do in response was stammer and nod, backing away from the door and from my friend as we made our grand entrance.
“HELLO, EVERYONE. HELLO, HELLO.” That awful voice! It had the same effect on the assembled company as it did on Mike Rourke, who stood ashen-faced in the doorway of the living-room. Tom Fuller dropped his whiskey and it went on the new carpet, and Roger Sutherland seized the opportunity to escape, running for a moist towel and some soda-water rather than staying a moment longer in that place. Marlene’s teacup rattled in its saucer like a bone, and poor Jeannie Rourke looked as if she might faint dead away. I may have dreamt it, but I will even swear I saw Margaret Sutherland’s eyes flash with rage for the briefest moment, and the vicious imp inside me counted that moment as well worth the price of admission.
But then she was on her feet, smiling prettily, her eyes as full of good humour as ever, holding the toy soldier that had once been my possession in her hand.
“Goodness me!” she boomed, in her deep soldier-voice, the red-carved wood waggling in her grip as if it was trying to escape. “I’m a redcoat, on my way from war! Will you march with me, little clothes-peg-boy?”
Part of me recoiled at her insolent naming of my friend. Names, I have been told, are magic, and to name a thing is to bind it. Perhaps that was Margaret Sutherland’s power, that she could name us all as her friends, create roles for us, slot us into her pretty little fictions of smoking-rooms and drawing-rooms and tea- and dinner- and cocktail-parties where everything was such, such fun.
But I had a trick worth any two of hers. The peg-boy spoke again.
“YOU ARE NOT FROM THE WAR-R-R,” the peg-boy said, for though the voice echoed from my own throat, and the spittle flew from my stretched lips, I would leave you in no doubt that the words were his, and his alone.
“Ho ho!” laughed the soldier, a hint of desperation creeping into Margaret Sutherland’s voice. “Why, of course I am! I’m a soldier, on my way from war! Who’ll march with me?”
“YOU HAVE ALL YOUR LIMBS,” the peg-boy said, and Jeannie made a high-pitched little gasping sound and covered her mouth with her hand. “YOU HAVE BOTH YOUR EYES. YOUR FACE IS NOT A RAGGED HOLE.” Tom Fuller was white as a ghost, and made no move to pick up his empty glass. “WHO DID YOU KILL.”
“What?” Margaret said in a faint voice, before recovering herself. There was the lightest trace of sweat upon her brow, but she still smiled brightly – a wide, mirthless smile, as if we were still playing the game. “Why – the Japs, of course!” Roger, returning with the cloth and soda, nodded vigorously at that; he had always been a man of deep and abiding patriotism. But Tom Fuller winced, as if troubled by an old wound, and in that moment I felt some pity for him. Tom had been at Okinawa. It was real to him.
To me, as well.
But the peg-boy did not care for what was real, and what was only doll-play. He had come to the doll-party, and now he would have his say.
“HOW MANY.” The croaking voice was flat and dead, bubbling up from a tomb world under a cold sun. My throat was raw, but I did not mind the pain. I did not truly feel that it was mine.
“Oh – hundreds!” Margaret sang out, gaily, losing the soldier voice by degrees. Tom opened his mouth to speak, but could not quite bring himself to do it. Instead, he stared at the bright red varnish on the wooden soldier, on the pretty wooden drum he held.
“DID THEY SCREAM.”
“Like little piglets!” Margaret’s face was flushed now, joyous as a boy’s on Christmas morning. In her eyes, she was winning our strange game, matching me point for point, seeing me off the field. She did not notice Jeannie, weeping silently, or Tom, standing like a statue, or Mike Rourke, who’d turned and walked out of the house, fists bunched.
“WAS IT FUN.”
“It was such fun! Such, such fun!” Margaret shouted, in her own childish little-girl voice, waving the wooden soldier to and fro, until Jeannie got up and followed her husband down the driveway at a run, tears streaming down her face.
There was a long moment of silence, during which Marlene put down her tea and picked up her coat. “It’s been a delightful game,” she said crisply, not looking at Margaret or her husband, “but we really must go.” Her husband must have been in full agreement, for he left with her without another word.
And then I walked away myself, with my wooden peg-boy in my grip, and left Margaret Sutherland with her husband, and her toy soldier, and the game she still believed she’d won.
I SHOULD HAVE slept like a baby that night.
If nothing else, I had broken the Sutherlands’ power over me. Perhaps in time the others would forget the hundreds she’d sang of killing, or the glee with which she’d described their end, but I knew it would not be for some long time to come.
For a moment, my fellow party-guests had seen a real soldier in her hands, and the red on his tunic had not been varnish, and what he held in his hands had not been a drum. And in her face, they had seen something worse than any expression my inner imp could have carved into a piece of wood; they had seen the callous indifference of one who cares for
fun, but not what fun has cost, who squanders time bought for her by blood, who would see the world outside her clique burn to ash without batting an eyelid. As long as one could still have nice plays on the radio, and a really good Martini, with fresh olive – well, what would be the difference?
And her clique was, at the root, a clique of one.
I should have been in bed, but instead I stayed up late into that night, drinking whiskey and savouring my anarchist’s triumph. And yet, with every glass, I could still see the peg-boy out of the corner of my eye, standing on the bookshelf where the soldier had been, leaning against the books, as his feet were too thin to stand up on. Unable to resist the urge any longer, I turned in his direction and raised my glass. “To our triumph, peg-boy.”
He stared at me in silence, with his empty eyes. I felt a sudden wave of irritation pass through me. There was something insolent about that sneer of his, some judgement to it that I felt I didn’t deserve. “Don’t look at me like that,” I muttered, fixing him with my own gaze, my own sneer. “You’re uppity – that’s your problem. Think you’re better than everyone.”
I sipped my whiskey, leaning back in my chair. He continued to look at me, the grimace on his face seeming to intensify. “You’re cynical,” I told him, “unpleasantly so. You were fun enough at the Sutherlands’, but now...” I shot him another look, finishing the drink. He stared back, as full of hate – yes, hate, hate and contempt – as ever. And all of it aimed at me! Me, of all people! Me, who had created him from a knife and wood!
“Damn you!” I shouted at him, rising from my chair and grabbing him my the waist, resisting the urge burning inside me to snap those damnable little legs from his body. “Why me? Why turn that look on me?”
