Hawthorne said, “Do you want the truth?”
“I want it and I’m entitled to it,” she answered, “for what I’ve done. Isn’t that so? You know it’s so.”
“The oracle,” Abendsen said, “was sound asleep all through the writing of the book. Sound asleep in the corner of the office.” His eyes showed no merriment; instead, his face seemed longer, more somber than ever.
“Tell her,” Caroline said. “She’s right; she’s entitled to know, for what she did on your behalf.” To Juliana she said, “I’ll tell you, then, Mrs. Frink. One by one Hawth made the choices. Thousands of them. By means of the lines. Historic period. Subject. Characters. Plot. It took years. Hawth even asked the oracle what sort of success it would be. It told him that it would be a very great success, the first real one of his career. So you were right. You must use the oracle quite a lot yourself, to have known.”
Juliana said, “I wonder why the oracle would write a novel. Did you ever think of asking it that? And why one about the Germans and the Japanese losing the war? Why that particular story and no other one? What is there it can’t tell us directly, like it always has before? This must be different, don’t you think?”
Neither Hawthorne nor Caroline said anything.
“It and I,” Hawthorne said at last, “long ago arrived at an agreement regarding royalties. If I ask it why it wrote Grasshopper, I’ll wind up turning my share over to it. The question implies I did nothing but the typing, and that’s neither true nor decent.”
“I’ll ask it,” Caroline said. “If you won’t.”
“It’s not your question to ask,” Hawthorne said. “Let her ask.” To Juliana he said, “You have an unnatural mind. Are you aware of that?”
Juliana said, “Where’s your copy? Mine’s in my car, back at the motel. I’ll get it, if you won’t let me use yours.”
Turning, Hawthorne started off. She and Caroline followed, through the room of people, toward a closed door. At the door he left them. When he re-emerged, they all saw the black-backed twin volumes.
“I don’t use the yarrow stalks,” he said to Juliana. “I can’t get the hang of them; I keep dropping them.”
Juliana seated herself at a coffee table in the corner. “I have to have paper to write on and a pencil.”
One of the guests brought her paper and pencil. The people in the room moved in to form a ring around her and the Abendsens, listening and watching.
“You may say the question aloud,” Hawthorne said. “We have no secrets here.”
Juliana said, “Oracle, why did you write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy? What are we supposed to learn?”
“You have a disconcertingly superstitious way of phrasing your question,” Hawthorne said. But he had squatted down to witness the coin throwing. “Go ahead,” he said; he handed her three Chinese brass coins with holes in the center. “I generally use these.”
She began throwing the coins; she felt calm and very much herself. Hawthorne wrote down her lines for her. When she had thrown the coins six times, he gazed down and said:
“Sun at the top. Tui at the bottom. Empty in the center.”
“Do you know what hexagram that is?” she said. “Without using the chart?”
“Yes,” Hawthorne said.
“It’s Chung Fu,” Juliana said. “Inner Truth. I know without using the chart, too. And I know what it means.”
Raising his head, Hawthorne scrutinized her. He had now an almost savage expression. “It means, does it, that my book is true?”
“Yes,” she said.
With anger he said, “Germany and Japan lost the war?”
“Yes.”
Hawthorne, then, closed the two volumes and rose to his feet; he said nothing.
“Even you don’t face it,” Juliana said.