Ellie came to him the next day, looking troubled. Louis was working on a model in his study. This one was a 1917 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost-680 pieces, over 50 moving parts. It was nearly done, and be could almost imagine the liveried chauffeur, direct descendant of eighteenthand nineteenth-century English coachmen, sitting imperially behind the wheel.
He had been model-crazy since his tenth year. He had begun with a World War I Sped that his Uncle Carl had bought him, had worked his way through most of the Revell airplanes, and had moved on to bigger and better things in his teens and twenties. There had been a boats-in-bottles phase and a war-machines phase and even a phase in which he had built guns so realistic it was hard to believe they wouldn't fire when you pulled the trigger-Colts and Winchesters and Lugers, even a Buntline Special. Over the last five years or so, it had been the big cruise ships. A model of the Lusitania and one of the Titanic sat on his shelves at his university office, and the Andrea Doria, completed just before they left Chicago, was currently cruising the mantel-piece in their living room. Now he had moved on to classic cars, and if previous patterns held true, he supposed it would be four or five years before the urge to do something new struck him.
Rachel looked on this, his only real hobby, with a wifely indulgence that held, he supposed, some elements of contempt; even after ten years of marriage she probably thought he would grow out of it. Perhaps some of this attitude came from her father, who believed just as much now as at the time Louis and Rachel had married that he had gotten an ass**le for a son-in-law.
Maybe, he thought, Rachel is right. Maybe I'll just wake up one morning at the age of thirty-seven, put all these models up in the attic, and take up hang gliding.
Meanwhile Ellie looked serious.
Far away, drifting in the clear air, he could hear that perfect Sunday morning sound of churchbells calling worshippers.
"Hi, Dad," she said.
"Hello, pumpkin. Wass happenin?"
"Oh, nothing," she said, but her face said differently; her face said that plenty was up, and-none of it was so hot, thank you very much. Her hair was fleshly washed and fell loose to her shoulders. In this light it was still more blond than the brown it was inevitably becoming. She was wearing a dress, and it occurred to Louis that his daughter almost always put on a dress on Sundays, although they did not attend church. "What are you building?"
Carefully gluing on a mudguard, he told her. "Look at this," he said, carefully banding her a hubcap. "See those linked R's? That's a nice detail, huh? If we fly back to Shytown for Thanksgiving and we get on an L-10l 1, you look Out at the jet engines and you'll see those same R's."
"Hubcap, big deal."She handed it back.
"Please," he said. "If you own a Rolls-Royce, you call that a wheel covering. If you're rich enough to own a Rolls, you can strut a little. When I make my second million, I'm going to buy myself one. Rolls-Royce Comiche. Then when Gage gets carsick, he can throw up into real leather." And just by the way, Ellie, what's on your mind? But it didn't work that way with Ellie. You didn't ask things right out. She was wary of giving too much of herself away. It was a trait Louis admired.
"Are we rich, Daddy?"
"No," he said, "but we're not going away to starve either."
"Michael Burns at school says all doctors are rich."
"Well, you tell Michael Burns at school that lots of doctors get rich, but it takes twenty years... and you don't get rich running a university infirmary. You get rich being a specialist. A gynecologist or an orthopedist or a neurologist.
They get rich quicker. For utility infielders like me, it takes longer."
"Then why don't you be a specialist, Daddy?"
Louis thought of his models again and of-the way he had one day just not wanted to build any more warplanes, the way he had likewise gotten tired of Tiger tanks and gun emplacements, the way he had come to believe (almost overnight, it seemed in retrospect) that building boats in bottles was pretty dumb; and then he thought of what it would be like to spend your whole life inspecting children's feet for hammertoe or putting on the thin Latex gloves so you could grope along some woman's vaginal canal with one educated finger, feeling for bumps or lesions.
"I just wouldn't like it," he said.
Church came into the office, paused, inspected the situation with his bright green eyes. He leaped silently onto the windowsill and appeared to go to sleep.
Ellie glanced at him and frowned, which struck Louis as exceedingly odd. Usually Ellie looked at Church with an expression of love so sappy it was almost painful. She began to walk around the office, looking at various models, and in a voice that was nearly casual, she said, "Boy, there were a lot of graves up in the Pet Sematary, weren't there?"
Ah, here's the nub, Louis thought but did not look around; after examining his instructions, he began putting the carriage lamps on the Rolls.
"There were," he said. "Better than a hundred, I'd say."
"Daddy, why don't pets live as long as people?"