The Short History of a Prince by Jane Hamilton Read Free Book Online

looking the part. His cousin’s husband, Roger Miller, had decided in the third grade to be an optometrist; Susan had always been on the ballerina track; Daniel had wanted to become a marine biologist.
    Through his twenties and thirties, Walter had worked at a dollhouse shop on the Upper East Side in New York City, selling furniture and house kits, and teaching his customers how to install the dinkiest marble tile, hardwood for floors, period molding and slate shingles. He understood the allure of the miniature because he had grown up helping Joyce put together and decorate her three-story town housewith a dormer. They’d wired the downstairs with electricity, so that at Christmas the impossibly small candles clipped on the three-inch tree in the parlor filled the room with what his father called a homier-than-thou yellow glow. Walter knew that for his adult customers the simple delight of reducing real life in all of its detail to fit on the coffee table was worth eyestrain and aching fingers. There was also the more complicated charm of creating a kingdom so small that a person could perfect it. What woman wouldn’t find it gratifying to make something incorruptible by human beings? No slob was ever going to track mud through the $4,000 Georgian brick town house with twenty-six hundred hand-laid mini bricks, or the English baby house with dentil molding, or the southern colonial, fourteen rooms, full attic, with clapboard siding and a cedar shake roof.
    Walter had been sympathetic to some of his clients at the shop, ladies who, like himself, loved the spirit of a house as much as the particulars of design and structure. To his way of thinking there was nothing hokey or Oriental in the idea that a house had a life and sensibility of its own. He would never have said that a building had an aura, but the long and the short of it was that some places felt right and others did not. He indulged himself in the pleasure of communion with his customers as together they bent over veranda spindles and newel posts and finely turned balusters. For a while he thought he might fill his studio apartment at Ninety-sixth and Amsterdam with a replica of his old neighborhood in Oak Ridge. His boss would have given him the materials at cost, the construction would occupy him for years, and when he finished, decades later, the Smithsonian magazine could do a feature on him—he, an old man with a hobby. He supposed at the root of the project was the normal longing to fashion his own history and commemorate what was past. A friend had dragged him to the Y, to a seminar on taking charge and living in the moment, but the theories and techniques were suspect, Walter thought. The moment, after all, was a flash in the pan. Life, he knew, had meaning and was fully possessed only as it was remembered and reshaped.
    It had taken Walter several years to admit to himself that he couldn’t go on indefinitely selling Lilliputian Coke bottles and microscopic toilet-roll dowels. What, then? How was he to spend his days and how was he to earn his bread and butter? Maybe through hischildhood he hadn’t focused, hadn’t crossed his legs at night on his bed, eyes closed, concentrating on Walter in a pinstriped suit, Walter shaking hands with the boss, Walter on the front page of The New York Times sealing a $70 million deal with a great American company.
    He had not visualized prosperity and fulfillment, and so he was thirty-eight years old, sitting at the end of the pier at Lake Margaret wondering where to live in the years before retirement. The wind blew across the lake, driving off the sailboats and turning the water a darker green. Already some of the leaves had yellowed, drifted to the ground and stuck in the bushes. The neighbors were burning brush and to Walter the air smelled of autumn. He watched the chipmunks darting to the holes in the cracked seawall with wads in their mouths, and he thought that if he were a small animal in Wisconsin he would