The Hair of Harold Roux

by Thomas Williams

  “Did you make it?” Mary said.

  “Oh no, my dear. I’ve improved it in certain ways, and added certain small details, but of course the manufacture of a steam locomotive is beyond my capabilities. No, the locomotive and the passenger cars were made by Sepp Gerhardt Aktiengesellshaft of Erfurt, in 1910. They were meant to be the toys of a Hohenzollern prince, but here they are—the toys of a retired colonel of the United States Army! Stranger things have happened, I assure you!”

  Allard was down on one knee looking at the silver piston rods and the sturdy driving wheels of the engine. Its steamy heat was real, oil and vapor leaking from its live, breathing vents.

  “The locomotive alone weighs over three thousand pounds, so you can see, Mr. Benson, that it’s quite a toy.”

  “It is,” Allard said. “It is, indeed.”

  “But now you must be the guests of the Lilliputown Railroad for the journey beyond the poplars!”

  The Colonel opened the three side doors of the first passenger car, revealing a single seat behind each door. Roof panels slid open, allowing the passengers’ heads to look out over the top of the car. Gallantly helping Mary into one compartment, the Colonel then checked the closing of all the doors before resuming his place in the tender—this time his head visible above the imitation coal. The bell rang and his head turned around toward them. “All aboard!” he shouted, and with a huff, a skid and a lurch they progressed toward Lilliputown itself.

  Allard had time to turn around once toward Mary, who had been given the rearmost seat, probably because of the smoke from the engine. Her eyes were wide and a little apprehensive. She smiled quickly and made a funny, mock-horrified face, as if to ask what their heads were doing sitting in a row on top of a railroad car, and then the train took them between the tall, yellow-green portals of the town proper.

  It was evident at once that this was someone’s ideal place, that a segment of another world had been created here. Buildings were arranged around a park through which a brook, a river within this scale, flowed quietly between stone embankments, below gracefully arched bridges. The trees, mostly elms, were too large, perhaps, yet they could have been great patriarchal trees. The air itself was somehow in scale, distances seeming longer than they could possibly be. It was the quality of shade, the way the shadows fell across this acre or two of tended landscape. The buildings were arranged around the park in an order that was neither uniform nor an obvious attempt to be random. On its own lot, with funereal-looking clipped hedges, was a little brown church, and then a bank in the Greek style (First National of Lilliputown), then a barbershop with its red and white striped pole. The scale, again, was hallucinatory in an unsettling way that kept the town from seeming midgetlike or cute.

  The train, swaying on its narrow tracks, wove in and out among the buildings, each of which had a landing area before its disguised entrance. Finally, with bell ringing and steam hissing, the train stopped so they could get out. The Colonel took an iron rod from the side of the cab and turned it in a switch in the tracks, then ran the whole train out of sight in what looked to be a stone-arched tunnel. Soon he came back, grinning, wiping his hands on a large red bandanna.

  He led them along a graveled path to the church, with its brown clapboards and high-peaked roof, its wooden Gothic windows. The building and its plantings had the somnolent, kept, Sunday-only look of all churches. A small arched signboard, glass-covered, stood near the broad doors. In tasteful white letters the legend said:

  THE LITTLE BROWN CHURCH

  IN THE VALE

  Rev. John Shuttlesworth

  Sunday Sermon: “They who have

  eyes, yet do not see.”

  “Now, come with me,” the Colonel said. He took them up the walk to the church. “Look inside,” he said, pointing to a little square peephole in one of the doors.

  Mary looked first, looked for a long time before she turned around, shaking her head, perplexed. “But this isn’t …” she said. “But aren’t all these … ?”

  The Colonel grinned so hard his scalp wrinkled. “Before you say anything, let Mr. Benson look too!”

  Allard put his eye to the dark little hole and saw a long aisle, rows of pews full of people, a stained-glass window down at the altar end, and a minister standing beneath the large window with his head bowed in silence. Light, the dusty beams of church light, fell from the high window onto the cross, the candlesticks, the pulpit with its opened Bible. Nearer, all the heads were bowed, various in their tilts toward reverence. A balding man, his wife, their small tow-headed child, an old woman with a frilly lace collar—all were bent toward the long perspective to the altar.

  “You saw it!” the Colonel said. “Didn’t you see it? Didn’t you see it, Miss Tolliver, with your own eyes?”

  “I saw a church full of people,” Mary said. “But I thought these were all …”

  “Now look again!” the Colonel said, and opened the church doors with a magician’s flourish, his arms still outstretched as he turned triumphantly toward them.

  Behind him, in a rather pleasant small room, were two single beds, an easy chair, a writing table with its Gideon Bible and ashtray, a straight chair, a floor lamp, a wastebasket, a casement window with a pretty view of trees, and a door which presumably led to a closet or bathroom. Allard found himself documenting these things as they slowly blotted out the quiet scene of worship he had known was there.

  “But you saw them!” the Colonel said. “You saw the altar, the people, the minister bent over the Good Book!”

  They looked at him.

  “Ah! Is it magic, my dear young people, or is it art? Perhaps the sermon should read, ‘They who do not have eyes, but see,’ because you saw what was not (or was it?) and real eyes cannot see what is not (or is it?)!”

  Allard noticed, on the inside of one of the church doors, at about the level of the peephole, a small cube about as big as a letter box. The Colonel saw him look at it. “Mr. Benson is beginning to see,” he said. “You are interested in real possibilities, isn’t that so? In how to do things? The difference between observer and maker, isn’t that right?”

  “You mean it’s all in the box?” Allard said.

  “It’s all in the box! Yes, all in the box! This is called trompe Voeil, which means ‘fooling the eye.’ I don’t think I like that name. Because, you see, the eye is so skillful, such an efficient, magnificent organ, sifting out what is irrelevant to its purposes, focusing exactly over such a wide range, changing, letting in more light or less according to what it must see or wants to see. And we use these very talents of the eye, not to fool it—no, I don’t like that word—but to reveal new dimensions. That is to say, we must understand it before we can show it new realities. Do you understand? What you saw, if my skill was great enough, was a church full of people, as Miss Tolliver said. A church full of people! Can you remember if you heard an occasional cough, a clearing of the throat, the shuffle of feet, perhaps the last dying chord of the organ? The congregation is at this moment quietly meditating, some of them even upon God. ‘Let us bow our heads for a moment in silent prayer,’ the Reverend Shuttlesworth has just said, and the church is almost silent.” The Colonel took a ring of keys from his pocket and selected a small brass one, with which he unlocked the little box on the door. “Look inside and you’ll see something entirely different!”

  They looked into the box to see rows of little cutouts, two-dimensional. A small bit of color at one end showed itself to be the stained-glass window. The top of the box was set with thin, arched pieces of wood to make it the ceiling of the church. A light bulb the size and shape of a Christmas-tree bulb gave light to what they had seen and believed.

  “Cardboard, cellophane and balsa wood, put together with glue,” the Colonel said. He shut the box and locked it. “To keep out curious little fingers. Children, especially, want to find out things. Who can blame them?” Again with the flourish of a magician, though now more subdued, he reverentially closed the church doors upon
the small bedroom. “And now I’ll show you, if you’d like, some more of the minor wonders of Lilliputown.”

  They followed him on a tour of his marvels, the sun slanting dustily through the giant elms, printing on their eyes the eaves, walls and cornices of his buildings. At the barbershop they peered through another trompe Voeil peephole to see the bald barber with his comb and scissors at the hair of a small boy who did not seem to be enjoying it at all. In the shop were the waiting customers, posters on the wall, a mirrored side that reflected everything in the plausible room. The saloon’s box was still in the process of being made, the Colonel said. It would, he thought, be his best so far, a period piece with Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane drinking at a round table center left, with a magnificent rococo bar of brass and mahogany and a painting of a voluptuous semi-nude on the wall behind it. Yes, he admitted to an unasked question, he did tend to mix periods and styles. His enthusiasms wandered, but never far from Lilliputown.

  They examined the Greek-revival First National Bank of Lilliputown, the City Jail, the Post Office, the General Store. He was planning little boxes for these too, but they took time to plan and make, and the mere maintenance of the landscape and the exteriors was time-consuming.

  As they strolled through the central park, where the clear brook ran quietly in its channel, the Colonel talked happily, looking around as eagerly as a tourist, observing his blessings with constantly renewed wonder. After a while he pulled out his gold pocket watch and said that it was time for him to attend to the details of their dinner, and would Harold be so kind as to entertain their guests for a while? He’d be ready for them at six-thirty. With a small bow and a bright nod, he was off.

  Harold took them up the path along the brook, climbing away from the village proper up a long rill of white water, through the trees, until they came to a deep pool filled by a narrow, three-foot falls at one end. Gray rock descended into the clear water, which must have been six or seven feet deep in its deepest places. The bottom was smooth, quartz-streaked granite smoothed by water, with patches of pebbly sand here and there. On one side of the pool was a grassy area and a small outdoor fireplace built of stone. The surrounding ledges were sun-warm even where they finally sat down in the shade of a young hemlock.

  “He’s slightly crazy,” Allard said. “But in a nice way, I suppose.”

  “He is a charming eccentric,” Mary said.

  “Who is he, anyway?” Allard asked Harold. “How’d your uncle get to know him? And his ‘Lady’!”

  “My uncle was his ‘batman,’ as he calls it, in France in the First World War. They always kept in touch.”

  “His wife’s a strange little bird.”

  “They’re both strange, I guess,” Harold said. “He doesn’t want her to do anything and she’s perfectly happy doing nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “She reads a lot.”

  “She doesn’t even help with the dishes?” Mary said.

  “No, he does everything. During the summer he hires someone to mow the grass, and a woman comes in to change the linen and do washing and things like that, but he does everything else. He’s quite a chef, too. I think even I’m gaining weight out here. But he’s the happiest person I think I’ve ever met. He worships Morgana.” Harold looked at Allard. “He thinks she’s the most wonderful object God ever made. ‘Perfect in every detail.’”

  “She looks sort of like a doll,” Mary said.

  “Especially with that hair and the clown spots on her cheeks,” Allard said.

  Harold shrugged. “She’s over fifty. Anyway, he thinks she’s beautiful.”

  “That’s nice,” Mary said.

  “But crazy.”

  “‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’” Harold said.

  “Yeah, but it’s nice not to have to work too hard at it.” They both looked at Mary, who blushed and looked away.

  “The water’s beautiful,” she said. “We should have brought our swimming suits. Wouldn’t it be nice to dive in there? It’s so clear.”

  “You could come out tomorrow,” Harold said.

  “Or we could go skinny-dipping right now,” Allard said. “We’ve got over half an hour.”

  “Oh, sure,” Harold said, looking away from Mary in the wake of this scandalous suggestion. She laughed, believing, no doubt, that this idea was too strange even to contemplate, as Allard now very seriously contemplated how this very thing could and would ultimately be arranged. Smooth Mary, silver-pink in the cool moonlight, sliding in the easy friction of water into his welcoming arms. That lovely cold. Just the two of them, of course. No shivering lonesome Harold Roux sitting on the rocks under his dry, inviolate wig, observing. Again he wondered how Harold Roux came by the authority to make him feel guilty, to make him spend any thought at all on the morality of his choices. There Harold sat, looking too neatly fragile to be sitting on anything as crude as a granite ledge, with that obviously fake wig on, and yet there was in him the iron of judgment.

  “But what do you do here, Harold?” Mary asked.

  Harold looked at her and then again away, flustered by her direct gaze. He half stuttered. “I … Fm sort of bookkeeper, clerk, errand boy, I guess. Also maybe an audience. I like them, I really do. They live as if they were very important. They are. I think I’ll stay on this summer.”

  “Important?” Allard said.

  “Their lives are formal. I don’t know. They live as if they were very glamorous people. Everything they do is important to them. It’s like they live every minute.”

  “It sounds exhausting,” Allard said.

  Harold disapproved of this tone. “They have the best of everything. Not the most expensive, but the best. Once the Colonel told me that life was too short not to have married the most beautiful lady in the world, and to take her for drives in a 1926 Bentley. You’ll have to see his car. It looks like it once belonged to a rajah or something.”

  “But, Harold, the little lady is more or less ugly.”

  “You’ll never understand. Never.” Harold was close to anger. He looked at Mary and then at Allard, shivering with disapproval, as though it were all too much to bear.

  “Are they rich?” Mary said.

  “I think they have some money, yes. This place is more like a hobby. I mean more than a hobby. They don’t advertise for customers, you know. There’s only the one little sign on the road. I think the Colonel wants people to be shocked—or maybe surprised is better. It all has to be unexpected. It’s such an out-of-the-way place. Anyway, he’s got his pension, too. They never seem to think about money at all.” Harold seemed breathless, nervous, as though he were giving away secrets, or being slightly disloyal.

  The little falls at the end of the pool splashed quietly, the sun slanted down over the rocks. A little brook trout, as if he had just noticed them, sped from one dark crack to another, where he disappeared after his wild underwater flight. Allard lit a cigarette and put the burnt match in his pocket. Smoke moved across the water without changing shape, then, still unchanging, moved like ectoplasm through the softwood needles. “I like it here,” he said.

  The statement was more important to him than it must have seemed to them. Mary was here, undangerous, friendly, waiting for him to be the maker of events, yet somewhat frightened of him and of her feelings. And here was honest Harold Roux (honest except for that one unmentionable flaw) to keep him somewhat in line with reality. Suddenly he felt so much energy in his legs he had to run up the side of the ledge, jumping from one shelf to another in his slippery leather-soled shoes until he reached the top. All around were nothing but trees, the soft green of pines and hemlocks, the harsher sunlighted green of maples and birch.

  “You could dive from here,” he said. They watched him, Mary smiling, Harold a little apprehensive. Instead of diving he came lightly stepping back down the ledge. He field-stripped his cigarette butt and put the little ball of paper in his shirt pocket with the match. “Tomorrow we’ll come out here and go s
wimming,” he announced. “Mary will wear her yellow bathing suit. When’s your next final?”

  “Thursday at eight,” she said.

  “All right, it’s settled. If it doesn’t rain. Two o’clock. All right, Harold?”

  “Yes,” Harold said. “I’ve got a final tomorrow morning and my car’s supposed to be ready by noon, so I could bring Mary out with me.”

  Harold was aware of the promise to her father about the motorcycle. Allard looked at Mary and spied her guilt. A flush, a warmth of skin there. He admired the curve of her cheek, her lips in tension with her skin. He was impatient to begin, but for the moment he watched her metabolism heighten because of his observing eyes.

  At twenty minutes after six they left the pool and went down the rill path to Lilliputown, now more in shadow, its imaginary people all within their real houses.

  The Colonel, who had changed into less informal clothes, though not quite a dinner jacket, led them into the dining room, helping Morgana and Mary with their chairs. Mor-gana’s chair must have been raised, because once seated she seemed of normal height, though small in other dimensions. She wore a dark red brocaded dress now, with a yellow chiffon scarf to mask the softness of her neck. The table was lighted from above by a chandelier of bulbs no bigger or brighter than candle flames, and the soft glow was reflected by glass and silver, linen and china. Morgana’s dyed hair had a reddish sheen caught here and there by the light. Compared to Mary, who was smooth and golden, she shone and twinkled with an ancient glitter. The Colonel was so pleased to be their host, to serve them “from my limited vocabulary of French cuisine, escalope de veau viennoise” and a red wine he had decanted into small clear pitchers—”a California Burgundy I won’t bother to name, but we like it.” First each of them was served a small crab on a plate, its shell removed and the meat arranged again in the shape of a crab, with two sauces, one yellow and hot, the other red and sweet.