Dangerous Visions (50 page)

"I've run up! Like the $250 cashmere suit you had to have last month. And the new golf clubs, and the credit card lunches—why don't you get on an expense account like everyone else?"

"All right," Eliot said wearily, "just let me balance the goddam account. If something's going to bounce I want to know about it."

"You just do that, lover," Julia said. "I'm going to bed—and don't wake me when you come up."

She swung around toward the door, the silk taffeta of her red housecoat rustling like a swarm of cicada—$99.75, Eliot thought savagely, Saks-Fifth Avenue. But the anger left him slowly as he thought of the bills, his as much as Julia's, the children's, the American way of life. Mortgage; country club; schools; lessons—for Christ's sake, dancing, and swimming and golf and tennis and ballet and the slide trombone; Dr. Smedley, the orthodontist, twenty-five bucks every time he tightened a screw on Pamela's braces; Michael at prep school and his J. Press sport jackets that seemed to average four a year; Julia's charge accounts and Dr. Himmelfarb at thirty dollars an hour because she was bored and scared, and pretty soon he'd be a candidate for the good doctor's couch himself; and, he forced himself to admit, his own clothes, his bar bills, the golf clubs, the expensive women he took out from time to time when he called Julia and told her he'd have to stay over in town. And above all, he thought, above all, me, myself, for allowing any of us to live this way, when I make $15,000 a year. But what can I do? he thought. In a couple or three years there'll be the vice-presidency open when old Calder retires; and I have to live as if I already had it, and if I don't they won't consider me—"not real executive timber"—and I'll end up like Charlie Wainwright—good old Charlie—chief cashier, with the small gold watch and the smaller pension.

There was a storm blowing up, the wind was rising, he could feel the too large house, with its second mortgage, creaking in the wind and calling out for money and more money, not just the extra personal loan he was paying off at usurious rates, but big money, a bundle, the long green.

He sat down wearily at the desk and began to figure it out. But even with the hypothetical Christmas bonus, he would still be in the red. For a while he could juggle bills, forget the doctor and dentist, stave off creditors, but sooner or later they would get nasty (while the new bills kept pouring in) and garnishee his salary, and that would be the end of him at the bank. It was two before he crawled into bed.

The next day was Saturday and he was up early, still groggy with fatigue, while the rest of the house slept. He left a note for Julia, saying he would be back in the afternoon, and then he drove north, toward his last hope.

It was not much of a hope. John Wardell, Julia's uncle, had never liked him and had never hidden his feelings. He had always let Eliot know he considered him a provincial
arriviste
who had had the insolence to marry into a fine old New England family. With his endowed Harvard chair, with his world-wide reputation as an authority on classical civilization, he made Eliot feel like some sort of trousered and bearded Goth trespassing in the Roman Senate. But Uncle John was retired now; he lived well in an old farmhouse upstate; he traveled to Greece and Italy every summer; he wintered in the West Indies. He should have a lot to leave Julia, his only relative, and Jim Eliot wanted to get some of it now, when they needed it, not later when it would just be extra income.

The huge black dog who began barking at him savagely, straining at its chain-link leash, reminded Eliot of the Roman hound from the Pompeian mural.
Cave canem
, he thought, standing back nervously, stretching out a carefully placating hand and waiting for someone to call the beast off. In a minute or two the front door opened and John Wardell stood there in corduroys and a red flannel shirt.

"Down, Brennus," he said, "quiet, boy."

The hound sat back impassively and Eliot walked by him nervously, with his hand outstretched.

"Well, Jim," John Wardell said, giving him a perfunctory handshake, "I don't see you here often; you must be in trouble. Come in and have a drink."

It took a long time to get it out—three drinks, in fact—but in the end Eliot told it all to the old man who hated him.

"It's not for myself, it's for Julia and the kids. If I don't get some help, we're dead."

"Of course, of course, Jim," the old man said, "I know you're not thinking about yourself. But just the same," he said, smiling maliciously, "I don't see any way out of it—unless you start embezzling from the bank."

Eliot jerked his head nervously, as if the old man were reading his mind. Then he forced a smile.

"I was thinking you might be able to tide us over for a while . . .Uncle John," he added, gravely and sincerely.

John Wardell began to laugh.

"You think I have money, Jim? You think Julia has expectations? You're waiting for dead men's shoes? Good God, all I have is my pension, and not much of that, and the big annuity I bought years ago. That takes care of it all. There's enough for me to live on, and it ends when I die."

Eliot looked at him hopelessly and extended his glass for a refill. Oblivious of the old man's clinical, detached amusement.

"The hell of it is," he said loudly, "if I had a bit of money, I couldn't lose. I could spread the risks. The trend is up. I could be rich."

"But you have even less than nothing, Jim," the old man said, "you owe more than you possess. Even if you could know the future, you couldn't raise enough to make it worth while."

"If I knew the future," Eliot said, "I could get hold of the money somehow."

"Is that all you want, Jim? That's really pretty simple. All you need is an oracle to consult—or a sibyl, as the Romans called it. You ask the questions, and the god gives you the answer through his priestess. No house should be without one."

For a while Eliot had thought that the old man had softened to him. Now, looking at the over-red cynical lips below the hawk nose and the white halo of hair, he knew that the fires were only banked.

"How would you like your own oracle, Jim?"

"If you're not going to help, don't needle me."

"There's a story in Petronius about an oracle in a bottle in Cumae. You just feed her regularly and she lives forever. Could you use something like that?"

"I'm going," Eliot said, struggling to his feet unsteadily.

"This is no joke, Jim. I've owed you a wedding present for eighteen years, and now I think I'll give you one. Just sit down."

John Wardell left the room, and in two minutes returned carrying a small doll-house. He put it carefully on the table. Eliot looked at it curiously. It was not the standard Victorian-mansion doll-house but strangely reminiscent of something he had seen ten years ago, on his one trip to Europe, at Pompeii.

The old man looked at him carefully.

"You recognize it? The house of the Vettii at Pompeii. In perfect scale. Look at the atrium and the pool, the rooms to the sides. I bought it there."

Eliot lowered his head to gaze through the gate into the atrium and the pool. From that position he could see nothing else; but he remembered that with most doll-houses the roof was hinged and could be lifted so as to give a bird's-eye view of the interior. He fumbled around the side of the model looking for a hook to unfasten. For a moment he thought he heard a scurrying noise inside the doll-house. He drew back his hand sharply, brushing against the structure and almost knocking it off the table.

"Leave it alone," John Wardell said, suddenly and sharply. "Don't look at the Oracle, she doesn't like it. Never do it, on your life."

"Are you trying to say there's something inside?"

"I don't need to, you heard her move. But don't open it, ever."

"How does it operate, then?" Eliot asked, humoring the old man.

"Do you see that empty pool past the atrium? Well, write your question on a slip of paper, fold it up and put it in the pool. Get a tiny bowl and fill it with milk sweetened with honey and push it inside the gateway. Then go away and the next morning take the piece of paper from the pool. There will be an answer written on it."

"Can you make it work faster?"

"Sometimes it can be done, but I wouldn't advise you to try. It stirs things up."

"Can't you make it work right now? Show me."

John Wardell shrugged his shoulders. Then he went to the kitchen and returned with a dried bay leaf. He lit it, holding it until it smoked aromatically. Then he pushed it into the doll-house, watching the pungent vapor curl through it.

"Now," he said, "what you want to know. Anything. Write it down quickly."

Eliot tore off a slip of paper and wrote on one side of it, "Who will win the World Series?" Then he folded it and slipped it into the empty pool.

"All right," John Wardell said, "we have to leave. Bring the bottle."

When they returned in half an hour, the pungent bay-leaf vapor had died out. Wardell leaned down and reached into the doll-house. In his hand was a folded piece of paper which he handed to Eliot.

Eliot unfolded it and read it quickly. Then he read it more slowly.

"
Fringillidae sunt
," he quoted, "what kind of crap is that?"

"The second word is easy," John Wardell said. "It means 'they [the winners] are.' But
Fringillidae
, wait a minute."

He pulled out the third volume of a twenty-volume classical dictionary, thumbed through it for a minute or two, then shook his head.

"It's a new word to me. I've never seen it."

"Then what the hell good is it?"

"I should have told you, the Oracle uses several languages and she tends to be obscure. You know—'If King Croesus crosses the river Halys with his army, he will destroy a mighty empire'—which one? Well, as it turned out, his own. He just didn't read it right."

"Don't worry about me, I can figure it out."

"Well, in that case you have no troubles."

There was a tinge of unpleasant mockery in Uncle John's voice, as though he knew something very nasty about Eliot, something the younger man should also sense about himself, something, above all, at which he should bridle if he owned the sensitivity to understand or the touchy sense of personal honor to take offense.

Then, abruptly, Eliot caught himself. This was advanced senility talking. He wanted money, a life preserver, a hook to fasten into the mountain from which he was falling, and here this crazy and slightly malevolent old bastard was offering him dreams and fantasies.

"Look, I don't know how you worked this dime store Cassandra, but if it isn't too much bother, would you mind telling me how this—this
Oracle
happened? I mean, what the hell is she? Where did she come from?"

"You really don't know?" the old man asked him. "No, I forgot, you wouldn't, of course. I imagine you majored in business administration, or salesmanship, or art appreciation at that educational cafeteria you attended."

Like uncle, like niece, Eliot thought savagely, remembering Julia's taunts the night before. You'd think I was some kind of a savage because I didn't go to Harvard. For a moment he was tempted to walk out, but his need and desperation were too great; and, too, for the first time in their association, he told himself he could sense something different from the cold, mocking hostility with which the old man normally treated him, as if Eliot had advanced from the status of outsider to that of bungling, inferior relative, but nonetheless relative. Or perhaps to the status of a large, stupid, clumsy dog with annoying habits, but still not completely outside.

"The Cumaean Sibyl," Uncle John went on, "as you would know if you had been given a decent education, was believed to be immortal. Originally, she was a young priestess of Apollo, and the god spoke through her lips when she was in a trance and foretold the future to those who asked. There were half a dozen such priestesses operating, but the one at Cumae took the fancy of the god Apollo and he gave her two presents—the gift of prophecy and immortality. Like any other mortal suitor, he was fatuously in love—but not completely so: when he caught his girl friend out on the grass one night with a local fisherman, he couldn't take away the gifts he had granted her, but he had wisely held back on giving her eternal youth to go along with immortality. And just to make sure there would be no more young fishermen, he reduced her to the size of a large mouse, shut her up in a box and turned her over to the priests of the temple to use for all eternity."

"You believe all this hogwash?"

Uncle John almost shrugged. There was too much uncertainty in the gesture for it to have been called a definite movement.

"I don't know really. There is a story in Livy that the second king of Rome talked with the immortal oracle at Cumae, and that was around 700 B.C. And then a contemporary reference in Petronius seven or eight hundred years after indicates that the same person, or maybe creature, was alive in his day, still functioning. I've tried to find out on several occasions, to go beyond the myths, but each time I get a reply that only confuses me more. Maybe she fell from the sky and couldn't get back. Maybe you'd feel more scientific and rational if I talked in terms of slipping over from another continuum, another frame of illusion, some other . . ."

"Oh, Christ, cut the crap," Eliot said under his breath. Then aloud, "What is it inside—a cockroach, a mouse, or what? How do you do the writing trick? Is it like the old money machine?"

"As long as you don't open the top and try to find out, and as long as it tells you what will be, what does it matter? If you find it more comforting to believe I'm a trainer of rodents or lice, or am lapsing into senility, then do so. Or if your conception of the universe is too limited to accept a miracle—from Mars or the Moon, or the past or the future, or
wherever
—then leave it by all means, and we'll both consider this visit fruitless. All I can tell you is that I bought it a few years ago somewhere between Cumae and the ruins of Pompeii, that I got it cheap, and that I've seen it work. '
La vecchia religione
'—the old religion, the man said, and he wanted a quick sale—probably dug it up illegally."