Mix-up in Miniature (3 page)

I caught a twinkle in her eye, which comforted me. I didn’t want to think the grande dame had passed over into a completely fictional world where the Morleys were her only friends.

Varena opened the door, and the Georgian mansion—the term “dollhouse” didn’t seem to fit—came into view, set on a low table in the middle of a dark-paneled room. Finally, my fantasy was realized and I was transported two centuries back. I changed my mind on the spot about the value of living in a fictional world with imaginary people.

I wanted in.

My breath caught at the light reflected from the tiny crystal chandelier in the Morleys’ foyer, brighter than the life-size one out in the life-size foyer. I’d read that several tiny, real diamonds from Varena’s jewelry collection had been placed strategically in the dollhouse chandelier. Rays bounced around also from the real silver cutlery and napkin rings on the polished dining room table, and from one or more jeweled objects in just about every room.

I could swear I saw a swarm of beautifully coiffed men and women gliding across the dance floor in the great ballroom. It wasn’t hard to picture Felicity, in her voluminous gown, and the handsome Rake sitting primly on the intricate mahogany and green-cushioned loveseat against the wall. No body parts would be touching, of course, but flirtatious looks would pass between them and their hearts would swell with the music.

I nearly fainted from the heat of my thoughts. No wonder romance novels were the biggest sellers in the book world.

Cooling off, I followed Varena’s mesmerizing voice. She pointed out the tiny books bound in leather and gold and a one-half-inch lapis lazuli statuette brought to her by a friend who’d worked on an archeological dig in the Fertile Crescent. Her finger, tipped lightly in a shade of red that matched her dress, stopped over a working, bubbling fountain in the courtyard.

“They tell me there are special waterworks underneath here, somewhere,” Varena told me, shrugging her shoulders and waving her hand at the base of the dollhouse, as if the notion confused her and all she cared about was the effect of the tiny sprays of water.

I wanted to sit in front of the house and inspect every miniature working clock and feel all the layers of fabric that made up the window treatments. I wanted to sit on the Regency side chair with gold-patterned upholstery and take a sip of tea from the silver service set on an ornate low table.

Mostly, I wanted to know which, if any, of the marvelous pieces Varena was excited about were her own creations. I knew Linda would have asked the moment they met. I could hear her in my mind, asking simply,
Is there a chance in hell any of this is your work?
I was glad Linda wasn’t here now to spoil my moment. Craftsperson or not, Varena Young had impeccable taste.

Every few minutes Varena stepped back, arms folded across all her chains and pendants, and smiled broadly. I could tell she enjoyed watching my delight in her treasures. Whatever had made me think Varena would be unapproachable just because she was never seen chatting with the locals at Willie’s Bagels on Sunday mornings, and we’d never bumped into her browsing in Rosie’s Bookshop?

I forgave her. She was too busy writing books, after all. And she was a crafter, or at least a crafts collector, a crafts lover, and therefore, “good people,” as Skip would say.

Though I was happy Linda was at her nursing job, I wished Maddie were with me. I wished Henry were with me. I wished Ken were with me.

I’d had enough class to leave my camera at home, but I wondered about taking notes. I didn’t want to forget a single detail of the dollhouse or its owner to share with my crafts group on Wednesday evening.

As for the bookmobile fund-raiser, if I had any doubts before today, I knew as soon as I set eyes on the Morley dollhouse that this building would not be gracing the auction table. I doubted it would even fit through the doorway to the exhibit hall.

I’d almost summoned the courage to ask my hostess if she enjoyed crafting herself. A diplomatic way to put it, I thought. But I was spared a potential faux pas by the arrival of a dark-haired woman in a plain blue shirtwaist dress and what my mother and aunts called sensible shoes. Not quite a uniform, but close.

“Excuse me, Miss Young,” the young woman said. She stood in the doorway, wringing her hands in apparent distress. Were all of Varena Young’s staff strung out? The two women I’d met who were in her employ were a sharp contrast to the smooth, stately Varena herself.

“Corazón, dear, not now. We can go over the menu later this evening,” Varena said.

“I’m sorry, Miss Young. It’s not for this weekend’s party. I wanted to tell you, you have a guest waiting in the upstairs den.”

I’d done enough tutoring of English as a second language to recognize Corazón’s Mexican accent, which, though controlled, came through in the way she pronounced
you
and words containing
r
’s.

Varena’s face took on a sternness I hadn’t seen in the entire fifteen minutes that I’d known her. “I have a guest waiting right here,” she said. I straightened my shoulders and felt my ego puff up a bit, even though apparently I wasn’t on the guest list for that weekend party.

Corazón patted her thick hair, wrapped in a net at the back. She sighed audibly. “Miss Young, they tell me you must come now.”

I felt sorry for the short woman who seemed to have too many bosses, and whose English pronunciation got worse as her stress level rose. I wanted to sit her down and work on the initial
y
sound, one of the most difficult to master for native Spanish speakers. “Think of your double
l
,” I’d remind her. “The way it is in La Jolla.”

Varena turned to me and bestowed an apologetic look. “Geraldine?” she asked, eyebrows raised, as if she were seeking my permission to leave me and attend to the upstairs guest.

“Please don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m very grateful for the time you’ve spent with me.”

I felt like a subject of the queen. In fact, I remembered, I was in the presence of a duchess. Only a rumored duchess, true, but that was more nobility than anyone else I’d ever stood this close to. The two grand houses, both the life-sized modern one and the modeled Georgian, had apparently sent me into a mode where I might curtsy at any moment.

“We still have business to do,” Varena said to me. “If it meets with your approval, I plan to donate my midsize Tudor to your auction. I’ve already tagged it for your event. I’ll show it to you when I come back. I hope it will be acceptable.”

My breath caught. Another great fantasy had come to pass—I’d snagged one of Varena Young’s dollhouses without even trying.

“Thank you, thank you,” I said. Too late to take one back. Maddie’s influence was showing.

“And, this might sound too forward, but wouldn’t it be lovely if now and then I could drop in on your famous crafts group?”

Famous? My heart sang. I was ready to gush again when Corazón, whom I was beginning to dislike, interrupted again, this time with a simple “Miss Young?”

Varena gave a resigned sigh. “Wait here, will you?” she asked me, as if she truly thought I might leave, perhaps insulted that I was being offered only a midsize Tudor or that she wanted to join our crafting sessions.

I glanced back at the dollhouse mansion that I’d only begun to explore. “I’ll be happy to wait,” I said.

Varena walked past Corazón toward the hallway. I wondered who would have been ushered directly to an upstairs room for a meeting with the lady of the house. I pictured long hallways with bedroom after bedroom, bath after bath. And a sitting room for special guests.

I noticed that Corazón hung back. When Varena was out of sight, she came up to me.

“You might as well leave,” she told me, in a near whisper. “It will be a long while.”

“That’s not a problem,” I said. I had miles to go in the miniature mansion. “I’ll wait.”

Corazón leaned closer. “It’s her brother upstairs.”

I wondered why she hadn’t announced Varena’s brother out loud, and I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to respond to this information.

“I’ll wait,” I said again.

Corazón turned and left the room, clearly not happy with me.

I wasn’t usually this stubborn, but I was buoyed by having met the real Varena Young, who seemed to value my presence in her home. I felt privileged.

I imagined I’d make a very unpleasant rich person.

What a day
I was having. I was now alone in front of Lord and Lady Morley’s home. I thought of them as new friends, along with Varena.

I’d sometimes worried in the past about the extent of my immersion into the world of six-inch beds and half-inch pencils, but belonging to a crafts community set my mind at ease. It was normal for miniaturists to imagine living in their creations, inhabiting the detailed replicas that gave them so much pleasure. Or at least that was what we told ourselves.

Three floors, an attic, and a basement stretched out before me. I gazed at a lovely rose quartz floor, bordered with jade, in the Morleys’ miniature drawing room. I studied a wooden spinning wheel, an ornate upright piano with mother-of-pearl keys, and a green cloisonné chair. I peered through a window from the outside of the house to get a different perspective and marveled at the way the copious, draped window treatments spoke of opulence.

For the first time I surveyed the life-size room I was standing in. Not only was the paneling as dark as that in the Morleys’ dollhouse study, but several elements of décor were identical. A paisley area rug under the table that supported the dollhouse bore the same pattern as a rug in the miniature study, and one wall of the room held a vertical array of swords that was mirrored by the tiny ones over the Morleys’ fireplace.

I ran my hand over the curved metal handle of the four-foot sword on the wall, the longest in the grouping, and then along the handle of the four-inch replica in the Georgian. I was nearly dizzy, straddling two worlds.

Crash/boom!

Had something fallen or broken? Not by my hand, I hoped, in my trancelike state. The noise echoed down the hallway and startled me. An earthquake? A temblor was always high on the suspect list for any Californian, but nothing in my vicinity showed any signs of motion.

The noise continued, now as loud voices.

I stepped into the corridor that led to the entryway. I could hear the muffled sounds of two or more people arguing upstairs. The whole area around the grand staircase was open and the sound traveled easily. I singled out Varena’s rich voice, but couldn’t understand what she was saying. She sounded frustrated one moment and angry the next. At times a male voice predominated—her brother, I assumed—but his words were no clearer. I heard a pleading tone, then silence, then more subdued voices.

I was embarrassed that I’d been eavesdropping on private conversations in someone’s home. As much as I was enjoying the dollhouse room, I decided to make an unobtrusive, unescorted exit from the property. I could always come back another day to claim the Tudor.

Corazón had been right to encourage me to leave before the visit-cum-fight started. Had she known that Varena and her brother were about to have a knock-down-drag-out?

I cast one last glance at the Morley mansion, glimpsing a charming shell chair with a turquoise satin cushion. I picked up my purse—the best I owned, but the least expensive item of any size, including all its contents, within miles—and left the room.

On my way to the front of the house, I heard more of the argument upstairs, picking out odd words and phrases for which I couldn’t glean the context: “You’re not fooling anyone,” from a soft male voice; “You’ll never be more than a…” from a stronger male voice, and something like, “After all these years…” from the female voice. Possibly Varena’s. I couldn’t swear to any of it and was glad I’d never have reason to.

The script could have applied to just about any family, I thought, at some moment in its history.

As I entered the area at the foot of the grand stairway, the argument appeared to have stopped completely. I stood still, waiting for another shoe to drop. I heard clocks ticking and a few bird chirps from the open patio door on my right. Nothing human from upstairs. I took a few more steps.

Still no more arguing. I considered rushing back to the Morley room to wait for Varena, pretending I hadn’t heard a thing. There were so many details I hadn’t examined at the Morleys’ and I hadn’t laid eyes on the Tudor, which I now thought of as mine. In fact, I’d already begun the calculations that would tell me whether I could afford to bid on it.

I could stay and wait, but I felt it would be awkward for Varena and me to resume our conversation as if nothing embarrassing had intervened.

Besides that, I was already slightly behind schedule for picking up my granddaughter at her after-school computer class in Palo Alto, about ten miles away. There wasn’t a specific ending time for the extended program, but Maddie and I had agreed that I’d be there around four-fifteen. It occurred to me that I should have alerted my sister-in-law, Beverly, that I might need her as backup car pool, but I’d been too excited about making this trip to the Heights.

I heard not another peep from upstairs, and tempting as it was to tiptoe back to the Morleys’ room and make myself comfortable, I let myself out the front door, got in my car without bumping into anyone on Varena’s staff, and drove away.

—

My
regrets as I left Varena’s home were legion. I’d meant to ask where she kept the rest of her dollhouses. Surely, they didn’t each have their own room.

A strange feeling crept over me and I wondered if I’d ever be back. What if Varena already regretted her promise to me and decided not to give up the Tudor after all? I should have stood my ground until I had the house in hand. A small Tudor was usually one large room with a stairway to a loft. A midsize version, which I’d been awarded, would have at least three separate rooms downstairs and two or three upstairs, plus a standard loft under a thatched roof. A midsize would just fit in the trunk of my car.

I didn’t look forward to giving my report to the library committee. “Even though I’ve met Varena in person, and we are now on a first-name basis,” I’d have to admit, “there is no dollhouse in my trunk. All I have is a hasty promise.”

By the time I got to sea level, I doubted even hearing the offer from Varena. I retrospectively picked apart her request for me to wait. What if she’d already regretted her offer and wanted to politely retract it? What if she interpreted the fact that I left as a refusal of her donation?

My stellar record of “least sales” and “worst negotiator” at any age was uncontested for now.

—

As
soon as I’d driven through the stretch of tortuous hairpin curves and was safely in the flatlands, I used my Bluetooth to call Henry.

“How did it go?” he asked.

I gave him a brief but exuberant summary of the grandeur behind me. I tried to remember the correct names for some of the wood-crafting features I’d particularly liked in the dollhouse: carved pillars, broken (that was a good thing) pediments, and Corinthian capitals topping the pilasters.

“So it’s not strictly Georgian,” he’d said.

“It was sumptuous,” I said, annoyed at his critique. “I wanted to crawl inside and live there.”

I told him about the duplicate walls of swords, and more to his interest, the metal tool rack standing in the basement of the dollhouse. Though most of the tools that hung from the two black crossbars looked modern—saws, wrenches, hatchets, long-nosed pliers, and the like—the display, with curlicued ornamentation, was reminiscent of a medieval torture rack.

“Did you get a donation for the auction?” he asked.

Why was Henry trying to annoy me?

“Are you hoping I’ll drive right by your street again?” I asked, sending an audible sigh toward the little green light on my Bluetooth.

His laugh brought me back to adulthood.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m rehashing my end of the conversation with Varena and coming up weak.”

“You’re too hard on yourself. Anyway, I’ve taken away any excuse you have for hurrying past my house again.”

What did that mean? My one errand for the afternoon was to pick up Maddie. Her mother, my wonderful daughter-in-law, Mary Lou, was at a meeting of art gallery owners in Houston. Richard had taken the opportunity for a few days’ leave from the hospital and accompanied her. It would give them a chance to spend some time together and visit old friends who’d moved there.

Maddie was mine for the next five days. The short commute from Lincoln Point to her Palo Alto school every day was hardly worth discussing when her parents asked if I could take care of her.

I realized Henry had chipped in, unsolicited, to help with the car pool arrangements. “You have Maddie?” I said.

“Yup. She was finished early and called about a half hour ago when she couldn’t reach you on your cell. I told her you were with some VIPs.”

“I hope she was polite at least.”

“You know she was. And she couldn’t get here too soon to suit Taylor. The two of them are collaborating on their science homework. Maddie has a great new book for a project on the conservation of energy.”

I yawned deliberately. “How exciting.”

“I know how that thrills you. Nice that their teachers use the same curriculum, though, isn’t it?”

“And even nicer that they have someone who’s not hopeless at science to help them.”

“You’re not hopeless. Just a little afraid.”

“There’s a lot to be afraid of.”

“Are you almost here?”

“Five minutes.”

“I’ll put the water on for tea, then, and start dinner. Hope chicken and dumplings are okay.”

It hadn’t been that long since Henry and I had slid into making assumptions about our relationship. I couldn’t pinpoint a day or a date, but somehow it had evolved that on a day like this, it would be natural for Maddie to call him to see if he knew where I was and for him to pick her up, and a matter of course that we’d all have dinner together.

I’d been a widow for several years and cherished Ken’s memory, but I also liked this new relationship more and more.

I decided to forgive Henry his purist opening remark about the eclectic mix of styles in Varena’s mostly Georgian dollhouse, and his reminding me of my inability to strike even the smallest of deals.

—

“Grandma,
Grandma! I missed you.”

Maddie nearly knocked me over with her battering-ram hug. Her heavy athletic shoes, running lights and all, knocked into my ankles. It had been almost two weeks since I’d seen her, which was unusual, but a nasty bug had attacked her respiratory system and had kept her out of school and also away from me.

“I missed you, too, sweetheart. Don’t ever get sick again,” I said, wishing I could make that happen.

Maddie reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out a tiny plastic bag. “I have a present for you. I didn’t have time to wrap it, but I can’t wait.”

I took the small bag and watched her grin widen as I extracted a jewelry box, less than a quarter-inch wide. Inside were red earrings—tiny crystal and red glass beads, to be exact, but more exciting to me than genuine rubies.

I drew Maddie back into a hug. “You know how much I need these for the top of that new dresser. They’re perfect.”

“I didn’t make them,” she confessed.

“We won’t tell anyone,” I said, kissing the top of her head.

“Especially Mrs. Reed,” she said. My friend Linda would be pleased to know that her unflinching reputation for do-it-yourself, and from-scratch, had spread to the next generation.

I didn’t look forward to the day, one I was warned by the experts to expect, when it would no longer be cool to give Grandma this kind of welcome. But, ahem, my granddaughter was special, gifted, and very mature. It was quite possible she’d skip that rebellious phase. Taylor, four months younger, hadn’t reached the coolness point either, so I had another powerhouse hug as I finally reached the front steps of her home.

“It’s Uncle Henry’s turn next,” Maddie said. Her smile indicated that she knew exactly what she was doing.

I responded to a longer, gentler hug from Henry. I hoped there’d be no outgrowing those.

—

Attorney
Kay Courtland, Taylor’s mother, brought the total to five for an early dinner. Kay was still in her business suit and pumps, dressed for her San Jose office, to which she’d have to return shortly, she informed us.

“I snuck out because I knew Grandpa’s chicken and dumplings were on the menu,” she said, looking at her young daughter. She dug into a full plate. “Don’t worry, I promised Dad I’d take him a big helping.”

“He’s negotiating, right?” Taylor asked.

Taylor had learned the word, plus a few manipulation techniques from Maddie, who was the best negotiator in any age group. No matter what the issue, she was somehow able to work things around to what she wanted, all the while seeming to agree with everyone else. She certainly hadn’t gotten that gene from her wimpy grandmother.

I mentally slapped the side of my head: Why hadn’t we sent Team Maddie in to negotiate with Varena? She’d never have let Varena get away after her promise. Maddie would have walked out of the house, her skinny legs staggering under that Tudor, and plunked it in my trunk.

Kay addressed us all. “Bill’s deep into merger negotiations with two big companies that want to swallow each other up. If we can keep them both happy, it’ll be a great coup for the firm.”

And I thought I had it tough, assigned to dollhouse detail. I gave an involuntary shudder, as if I’d suddenly been asked to help Bill seal the deal.

Taylor’s parents, partners in their own downtown law firm, often worked late. One of the reasons a live-in grandfather was the perfect setup. The house had belonged to the Baker family since Kay was a toddler. More than once, Kay and Bill had come close to buying a home of their own, but no one in the group of four really wanted that, and for the time being, the combined Baker-Courtland plan was serving everyone’s emotional and physical needs.

I tried to keep my description of my best dollhouse day thus far to a minimum, not monopolizing the conversation, but I couldn’t help my verbal swooning over the Morleys’ weeping-willow fountain and pool banked with flowers, which impressed even Kay.

“Too bad you couldn’t take pictures,” Taylor said.

“It’d be better if you just take us all with you, Grandma,” was Maddie’s predictable solution.