Little, Big

II.

. . . la que, en volto comenzando humano,

acaba en mortal fiera,

esfinge bachillera,

que hace hoy a Narciso

escos solicitar, desdenar fuentes . . .

—De Gongora, Soledades

Auberon was awakened first by the crying of a cat.

"An abandoned child," he thought, and went back to sleep. Then the bleating of goats, and the raucous, strangled reveille of a cock. "Damn animals," he said aloud, and was again returning to sleep when he remembered where he was. Had he really heard goats and chickens? No. A dream; or some City noise transformed by sleep. But then cockcrow came again. Pulling the blanket around him (it was deathly cold in the library, the fire long since out) he went to the mullioned window and looked down into the yard. George Mouse was just returning from the milking, in high black rubber boots, carrying steaming milk-pail. From a shed roof a scrawny Rhode Island Red lifted his clipped wings and gave the cry again. Auberon was looking down on Old Law Farm.


Old Law Farm

Of all George Mouse's fantastic schemes, Old Law Farm had had the virtue of necessity. These dark days, if you wanted fresh eggs, milk, butter, at less than ruinous prices, there was nothing for it but to supply them yourself. And the square of long-empty buildings was uninhabitable anyway, so its outside windows were blinded with tin or blackened plywood, its doors stopped with cinder block, arid it became the hollow castle wall around a farm. Chickens now roosted in the degraded interiors, goats laughed and bewailed in the garden apartments and ate orts from claw-foot bathtubs. The nude brown vegetable garden which Auberon looked out on from the library windows and which took up much of the old backyards within the block was rimy this morning; orange pumpkins showed beneath the remains of corn and cabbage. Someone, small and dark, was going carefully up and down the wrought-iron fire escapes and in and out of frameless windows. Chickens squawked. She wore a sequined evening gown, and shivered as she collected eggs in a gold lamé purse. She looked disgusted, and when she called out something to George Mouse he only pulled his wide hat down further over his face and galoshed away. She came down into the yard, stepping amid the mud and garden detritus on fragile high heels. She shouted a word after George, flinging up an arm, then tugged her fringed shawl angrily around her shoulders. The lamé purse over her arm just then gave way under its load of eggs, and one by one they began to fall out as though laid. At first she didn't notice, then cried out—"Oh! Oh! Yike!"—and turned to prevent more from falling; turned her ankle as a heel gave way; and burst into laughter. She laughed as the eggs fell through her fingers, laughed bent over, slipped in egg-slime and nearly fell, and laughed harder. She covered her mouth, delicately; but he could hear the laugh—deep and raucous. He laughed too.

He thought then—seeing those eggs break—that he would find out where breakfast was happening. He tugged his wrinkled and spiralled suit into something like its right shape; he screwed his knuckles into his eyes, and ran his hand through his proud hair—an Irish comb, Rudy Flood always called that. But then he had to choose the door, or the window he had come in by. He remembered passing somewhere where food was cooking on his way into the library, and so he took up his bag—didn't want it inspected or stolen—and crept out onto the rickety bridge, shaking his head at the ridiculous crouch he must make. The boards groaned underhim and drab light came in through the cracks. Like an impossible passageway in a dream. What if it fell under him, dropping him down the airshaft. And the window at the other end might he locked. God this was stupid. What a stupid way to get from one place to another. He tore his jacket on a protruding nail and hunkered furiously back the way he had come.

Out with ruffled dignity and smutty hands through the solid old doors of the library and down the winding stairs. In a statue-niche at a turning a pinch-faced silent-butler in a pillbox hat stood, holding out a corroded ashtray. At the bottom of the stairs, a hole had been knocked in the wall, a brick-toothed rent that led into the next building, perhaps the building George had originally admitted him to, or was he disoriented now? He went through the hole, into a building of another kind, not faded elegance but aged poverty. The number of coats of paint these stamped-tin ceilings had had, the layers of linoleum one over another on these floors: it was impressive, almost archaeological. A single dim bulb burned in the hall. There was a door whose many locks were all open, and music coming from within, and laughter and odors of cooking; Auberon approached it, but was overcome by shyness. How did you approach the people of this place? He would have to learn; he who had rarely seen around him a face he hadn't known since babyhood was surrounded now by no one but strangers, millions of them.

But he didn't feel like going in that door just now.

Angry at himself but unable to change his mind, he wandered away down the hall. Daylight showed through the opaque glass imbedded with chicken wire of a door at the hall's end, and he shot its bolt and opened it; he found himself looking out over the farmyard in the middle of the block. In the buildings around it were dozens of doors, each different, each obstructed by a different sort of barrier, rusted gates, chains, wire fencing, bars, locks, or all of those, and yet looking fragile and openable. What was behind them? Some stood wide, and through one he glimpsed goats. There came out from it then a small, a very small man, a bandy-legged black man with enormously strong arms, who carried on his back a great burlap sack. He hurried across the yard at a quick pace despite his short legs (he was no bigger than a child) and Auberon called out to him: "Excuse me!"


He didn't stop. Deaf? Auberon set out after him. Was he naked? Or wearing some coverall the same color as himself? "Hey," Auberon called, and this stopped the man. He turned his big dark flat head to Auberon, and grinned widely; his eyes were mere slits above his broad nose. Boy, the people here get positively medieval, Auberon thought; effects of poverty? He was about to frame a question, sure now the man was idiotic and wouldn't understand, when with a long black sharp-nailed finger the man pointed behind Auberon.

He turned to look. George Mouse had just opened a door there, releasing three cats; he shut it again before Auberon could call him. He started for that door, tripping in the ruts of the garden, and turned back to wave thanks to the little black man, but he was gone.

At the end of the hall to which the door led him he paused, smelling cooking, and listened. Inside he could hear what sounded like an argument, the clash and rattle of pots and dishes, a baby crying. He pushed on the door, and it swung open.



The Bee or the Sea

The girl he had seen dropping eggs stood at the stove, still in her golden gown. A child of almost visionary beauty, its face streaked with dirty tears, sat near her on the floor. George Mouse presided at a large circular dining table, beneath which his muddy boots took up a lot of room. "Hey," he said. "Grits, my man. Sleep well?" He rapped with his knuckles at the place next to his. The baby, only momentarily intrigued by Auberon, prepared himself for another round of crying by sputtering tiny bubbles from his angelic lips. He tugged at the girl's gown.

"Ay, coño, man," she said mildly, "take it easy," just as she might have to a grown-up; the kid looked up at her as she looked down, and they seemed to come to an understanding. He didn't cry again. She rapidly stirred a pot with a long wooden spoon, an action she did with her whole body, making her gold-clad bottom snap neatly back and forth. Auberon was watching this closely when George spoke again.

"This is Sylvie, my man. Sylvie, say hello to Auberon Barnable, who's come to the City to seek his fortune."

Her smile was instant and unfeigned, sun bursting from clouds. Auberon bowed stiffly, aware of the blear in his eye and the shadow on his cheek. "You want some breakfast?" she said.

"Sure he does. Sittee downee, cousin."

She turned back to the stove, plucking from the little ceramic auto where they rode one of two top-hatted figures labeled Mr. Salty and Mr. Peppy, and shook him vigorously over the pot. Auberon sat down, and folded his hands in front of him. This kitchen looked out through diamond-paned windows at the farmyard, where now someone, not the strange man Auberon had seen, was driving the goats amid the decaying vegetation—with a yardstick, Auberon noted. "Do you," he asked his cousin, "have a lot of tenants here?"

"Well, they're not exactly tenants," George said.

"He takes them in," Sylvie said, looking fondly at George. "They got no place else to go. People like me. Because he has a good heart." She laughed, stirring. "Little lost squirrels and stuff."

"I sort of met someone," Auberon said, "a black guy sort of, out in the yard . . . ." He saw that Sylvie had stopped her stirring, and had turned to him. "Very short," Auberon said, surprised at the silence he'd made.

"Brownie," Sylvie said. "That was Brownie. You saw Brownie?"

"I guess," Auberon said. "Who . . ."

"Yeah, old Brownie," George said. "He's kind of private. Like a hermit. Does a lot of work around the place." He looked at Auberon curiously. "I hope you didn't . . ."

"I don't think he understood me. He went off."

"Aw," Sylvie said gently. "Brownie."

"Did you, well, take him in too?" Auberon asked George.

"Hm? Who? Brownie?" George said, having fallen into thought. "Nah, old Brownie's always been here, I guess, who the hell knows. So listen," he said, definitely changing the subject, "what are you up to today? Negocio?"

From an inside pocket Auberon took out a card. It said PETTY, SMILODON & RUTH, Attorneys-at-law, and gave an address and phone number. "My grandfather's lawyers. I've got to see about this inheritance. Can you tell me how to get there?"

George puzzled over this, reading the address aloud slowly as though it were esoteric. Sylvie, hiking her shawl over her shoulder, brought a battered, steaming pot to the table. "Take the bee or the sea," she said. "Here's your nasties." She banged the pot down. George inhaled the steam gratefully. "She don't eat oatmeal," he said to Auberon, with a wink.

She had turned away, her face, her whole body in fact, showing aversion very graphically, and (changing utterly in an instant) picked up with easy grace the child, who was in the process of sword-swallowing a ball-point pen. "Que jodiendo! Look at this implement. C'mere, you, look at these fat cheeks, so cute, don't they make you want to bite 'em? Mmmp." She sucked his fat brown cheeks avidly as he struggled to escape, eyes screwed tight. She sat him down in a rickety high-chair whose decals of bear and rabbit were all but worn away, and set food before him. She helped him eat, opening her mouth when he did, closing it around an imaginary spoon, cleaning the excess neatly from his face. Watching her, Auberon caught himself opening his own mouth in assistance. He snapped it shut.

"Hey, sport model," George said to Sylvie as she finished with the baby. "You going to eat or what?"

"Eat?" As though he had made an indecent suggestion. "I just got here. I'm going to bed, man, and I'm going to sleep." She stretched, she yawned, she offered herself wholeheartedly to Morpheus; she scratched her stomach lazily with long painted nails. The gold gown showed a small shadowed hollow where her navel was. Auberon felt that her brown body, however perfect, was too small to contain her; she shot out from it all over in flashes and spikes of intelligence and feeling; even her impersonation now of exhaustion and debility exploded from her like a brilliance.

"The bee or the sea?" he said.


A Wingéd Messenger

Riding racketing uptown on the B train underground, Auberon—with no experience at all of such things to guide him—tried to puzzle out what relation there might be between George and Sylvie. He was old enough to be her father, and Auberon was young enough to find the possibility of that kind of May-December coupling unlikely and repellent. Yet she had been making breakfast for him. What bed did she go to, when she went to bed? He wished, well, he didn't know quite what he wished, and just then an emergency occurred on the train which threw all that out of his mind. The train began shaking violently to and fro; it screamed as though tormented; it was apparently about to burst apart. Auberon leapt up. Loud metallic knockings beat on his ears, and the lights shuddered and went out. Clutching a cold pole, Auberon waited for the imminent collision or derailment. Then he noticed that no one on the train seemed the least concerned; stony-faced, they read foreign-language newspapers or rocked baby carriages or rooted in shopping bags or chewed gum placidly, my God those asleep didn't even stir. The only thing they seemed to find odd was his own leaping up, and this they only glanced at furtively. But here was the disaster! Outside the almost comically filthy windows he saw another train, on a parallel track, sweeping toward them, whistles and iron shrieks, they were about to sideswipe, the yellow windows (all that was visible) of the other train rushed at them like eyes aghast. At the last possible instant the two trains shifted minutely and resumed their furious parallel, inches from one another's flanks, racing madly. In the other train Auberon could see placid overcoated riders reading foreign newspapers and rooting in shopping bags. He sat down.

An aged black man in ancient clothes, who through all of this had been lightly holding a pole in the middle of the car, was saying as the noise diminished, "Now don't get me wrong—don't get me wrong," holding out a long, gray-palmed hand to the passengers in general, whom, studiously ignoring him, he was reassuring. "Don't get me wrong. A well-dressed woman's sumpm to see, now, y'know, y'know, a thing of beauty's, yunnastan, a joy fevvah; what I'm talkin 'bout's a woman who wears a fuh. Now don't get me wrong—" a deprecatory shake of the head to forestall criticism "—but y'see a woman who wears a fuh takes on the propensities of that animal. Y'see. Takes on the propensities of the animal of whose fuh she wears. Thass right." He struck a casual, raconteur's pose and glanced around at his hearers with benign intimacy. As he pushed aside his unspeakable overcoat to place his knuckles on his hip, Auberon saw the heavy swing of a bottle in the pocket. "Now I was in Saks Fiff Avenue thutha day," he said, "and there was ladies pricin' a coat made from the fuh of the sable." He shook his head to think of it. "Now, now, of all th'animals in God's creation the sable animal has got to be the lowest. The sable animal, my friends, will eat its own children. Y'hear what I'm sayin'? Thass right. The sable is the dirtiest, low-downest, meanest—the sable is a meaner and a lower thing than a mink, people, than a mink, and surely you know where the mink is at. Well! And here was these nice ladies, wouldn't hurt a fly, feelin' up this coat made of the sable animal, yas yas, ain't it fine—" He laughed, delicately, unable to check his amusement any longer. "Yas, yas, the propensities of the animal, no doubt about it. . ." His yellow eyes fell on Auberon, the only one there who'd followed him with any attention, wondering if he were right. "Mmm-mmm-mmm," he said, absently, his discourse done, a half-smile on his face; his eyes, wise, humorous, and reptilian at once, seemed to find something amusing in Auberon. The train just then turned a shrieking corner, propelling the man forward down the car. He gavotted away neatly, never falling, though without balance, the bottleweighted pocket clanking on the poles. As he passed, Auberon heard him say "Fans and furred robes hide all." He was brought up by the train's coming to a halt, began to dance backward; the doors slid open, and a final lurch of the train tossed him out. Just in time, Auberon recognized his own stop, and leapt out also.

Clamor and acrid smoke, urgent announcements that were a garble of static and drowned anyway by the metal roar of trains and the constant echo and re-echo. Auberon, utterly disoriented, followed herds of riders upward along stairs, ramps, and escalators, and found himself still apparently underground. At a turning, he caught a glimpse of the black man's overcoat; at the next—which seemed intent on leading him downward again—he was beside him. He seemed now preoccupied, walking aimlessly; the garrulousness he had shown in the train was gone. An actor offstage, with troubles of his own.

"Excuse me," Auberon said, fishing in his pocket. The black man, with no surprise, held out a hand to receive what Auberon would offer, and with no surprise withdrew the hand when Auberon came up with only the card of Petty, Smilodon & Ruth. "Can you help me find this address?" He read it. The black man looked doubtful.

"A tricky one," he said. "Seems to mean one thing, but it don't. Oh, tricky. Take some findin'." He shuffled off, bent and dreaming, but his hand down at his side motioned with a quick motion that Auberon should follow. "Ever'man I will go with thee," he muttered, "and be thy guide, in thy mose need to be by thy side."

"Thanks," Auberon said, though not quite sure this was meant for him. He grew less sure as the man (whose gait was quicker than it looked, and who gave no warning at turnings) led him through dark tunnels reeking of urine, where rainwater dripped as though in a cave, and along echoing passages, and up into a vast basilica (the old terminal), and further upward by shining stairs into marble halls, he seeming to grow shabbier and smell stronger as they ascended into clean public places.

"Lemme see that again one time," he said as they stood before a rank of swiftly-revolving doors, glass and steel, through which a continual stream of people passed. Auberon and his guide stood directly in their path, the black man unconscious of them as he studied the little card, and the people flowed around them neatly, their faces fixed in angry looks, though whether because of this obstruction or for reasons of their own Auberon couldn't tell.

"Maybe I could ask someone else," Auberon said.

"No," said the black man without rancor. "You got the one. Y'see I'm a messenger." He looked up at Auberon, his snake eyes full of unreadable meaning. "A messenger. Fred Savage is my name, Wingéd Messenger Service, I only am escaped to tell thee." With quick grace he entered the threshing blades of the door. Auberon, hesitating, nearly lost him, threw himself into an empty segment, and was spun out rapidly into a thin cold rain, outdoors at least, and stepped rapidly to catch up with Fred Savage. "My man Duke, y'know," he was saying, "met the Duke 'bout midnight in a lane behind of the churchyard, with the leg of a man over his shoulder. I says hey, Duke, my man. Said he was a woof—only difference was, a woof is hairy on the outside, y'see, and he was hairy on the inside—said I could rip up his skin and try . . ."

Auberon dodged after him through the well-drilled march and press of people, doubly afraid of losing him now since Fred Savage hadn't given back the lawyers' card. But still he was distracted, his eye drawn upward to heights of buildings, some lost in the rainy clouds, so chaste and noble at the tops and, at their bases, so ignoble, stuffed with shops, lettered, scarred, imposed upon, overlaid like mammoth oaks on which generations have carved hearts and nailed horseshoes. He felt a tug at his sleeve.

"Don't be gawking upward," Fred Savage said, amused. "Good way to get your pocket picked. Besides"—his grin was wide, either his teeth were extraordinarily perfect or these were dentures of the cheapest kind—"they're not for lookin' up at anyway by the likes of you, y'know, no, they're for lookin' out of by the type of folks inside, yunnastan. You'll learn that, heehee." He drew Auberon with him around a corner and along a street where trucks contested with one another and with taxis and people. "Now if you look close," Fred Savage said, "you see this ad-dress seems to be on the avenue, but thass a fake. It's on thisere street, though they don't want you to guess it."

Cries and warnings from above. Out of a second-story window, an enormous ormolu mirror was being extruded, hung on guy-ropes and tackle. On the street below were desks, chairs, filing cabinets, an office in the street, people had to step out into the loathsome gutter to get around it; only just then trucks clogged the street, the warnings increased—"Watcha back, watcha back!"—and no one could move. The mirror swung free out into the air, its face which had before reflected only quiet interiors now filled with shuddering, madly-swinging City. It looked ravished, aghast. It descended slowly, rotating, flinging buildings and backward-reading signs to and fro within it. The people stood gaping, waiting for their own selves, overcoated and umbrella'd, to be revealed.

"C'mon," Fred said, and took Auberon's hand in a strong grip. He dodged amid the furniture, drawing Auberon after him. Shouts of horror and anger from the mirror's attendants. Something was wrong: the ropes suddenly paid out, the mirror tilted madly only feet above the street, a groan from the watchers, worlds came and went as it righted itself. Fred shuffled beneath it, his hat-crown grazing its gilding. There was the briefest moment when Auberon, though looking into the street behind him, felt himself to be looking into the street ahead, a street from which or into which Fred Savage had disappeared. The he crouched and passed under.

On the other side, still followed by the curses of the mirror men, and by some kind of thunder as well from somewhere, Fred led Auberon up the vast arched entrance to a building. "Be prepared is my motto," he said, pleased with himself, "be sure you're right then go ahead." He pointed out the number of the building, which was indeed an avenue number, and handed back the little card; he patted Auberon's back to encourage him in.

"Hey, thanks," Auberon said, and, bethinking himself, dug in his pocket, and came up with a crumpled dollar.

"The service is free," Fred Savage said, but took the dollar anyway delicately in thumb and index. There was a rich history incised in his palm. "Now go ahead. Be sure you're right, then go ahead." He propelled Auberon toward the brass-bound glass doors. As he entered, Auberon heard the thunder, or felt the bombblast, or whatever it was, again, only much huger; it made him duck, a long tearing roll as though the world, starting at one corner, were being bisected. As it rolled away, there came a gasp, a groan from many throats together, with high-shrieking feminine overtones; and Auheron braced himself against the unmistakable noise of an enormous, a great glass smashing—unmistakable though Auberon had never before heard a piece that size shivered.

Now how many years' bad luck is that for someone, he thought, wondering if he had escaped something.


A Folding Bedroom

"I'm putting you in the folding bedroom," George said as he led Auberon by flashlight through the mostly empty warren of buildings that surrounded Old Law Farm. "It's got a fireplace at least. Watch that stuff there. Up we go."

Auberon followed, shivering, carrying his bag and a bottle of Doña Mariposa rum. A sleety rain had caught him on his way downtown, slicing cleanly through his overcoat and, so it felt, through his skinny flesh as well to chill his heart. He had hidden from it for a while in a little liquor store whose red sign—LIQUOR—went on and off in the puddles outside the door. Feeling intensely the shopkeeper's impatience at his free use of a place of business for profitless shelter, Auberon had begun staring at the various bottles, and at last bought the rum because the girl on its label, in a peasant blouse, arms full of green cane-stalks, reminded him of Sylvie; or rather seemed to him what Sylvie would look like if she were imaginary.

George took out his bunch of keys and began hunting through them abstractedly. His manner since Auberon had returned had been glum, distracted, unaccommodating. He talked ramblingly about the difficulties of life. Auberon had questions to ask him, but felt he would get no answers to them from George in this state of mind, so he only followed silently.

The folding bedroom was double-locked, and George was some time opening it. There was electric light inside though, a lamp that on its cylindrical shade carried a panorama, a country scene through which a train moved, its locomotive almost devouring its caboose, like the Worm. George looked around the room, finger to his lips, as though long ago he had lost something here. "Now the thing is," he said, and then nothing more. He gazed at the spines of a shelf of paperbacks. The locomotive on the lampshade began to travel slowly through the landscape, caused to move by the heat of the bulb. "See, we all pull together here," George said. "Everybody does his part. You can dig that. I mean the work's never done and all. So. This is all right, I guess. That john's the closet, the other way around I mean. The stove and stuff is off, but eat with us, everybody chips in. Well. Listen." He counted his keys again, and Auberon had the feeling he was about to be locked in; but George slipped three from the ring and gave them to him. "Don't for God's sake lose them." He managed a bleak smile. "Hey, welcome to Big-town, man, and don't take any wooden nickels."

Wooden nickels? It seemed to Auberon as he closed the door that his cousin's speech was as full of antique rubbish and battered ornament as his Farm. A card, maybe he'd call himself. Well: a peculiarity felt more than perceived about this folding bedroom became clear to him as he looked around: there was no bed in it. There was a wine-red velvet boudoir chair, and a creaky wicker one with pillows tied on; there was a shabby rug, and an enormous wardrobe or something of glossy wood, with a bevelled looking-glass on its front and drawers with brass pulls at the bottom; this he couldn't figure out how to open. But there was no bed. From a wooden apricot crate (Golden Dreams) he took wood and paper and made a fire with trembling fingers, contemplating a night on the chairs; for sure he wasn't going to try threading his way back through Old Law Farm to complain.

When the fire was hot he began to feel somewhat less sorry for himself; in fact as his clothes dried he felt almost an elation. Kind Mr. Petty of Petty, Smilodon & Ruth had been oddly evasive about the status of his inheritance, but they had willingly advanced him a sum against it. He had it in his pocket. He had come to the City and not died or been beaten; he had money, and the prospect of more; real life was beginning. The long, long ambiguity of Edgewood, the stifling sense of mysteries continually propounded, never solved, the endless waiting for purposes to be made clear and directions pointed out—all over. He had taken charge. A free agent, he would make a million, win love, and never go home at bedtime any more. He went to the tiny kitchen attached to the folding bedroom, where the dead stove and a lumpish refrigerator presumably also dead shared the floor with a tub and a sink; he dug up a white coffee mug all crazed, wiped the husk of a bug from it, and got out his bottle of Doña Mariposa rum.

He was holding a mugful of this in his lap, looking into the fire with a grin on his face, when there came a knocking at the door.


Sylvie and Destiny

It took him a moment to see that the dark shy girl at his door was the same he had seen breaking eggs in a golden gown. Dressed now in jeans faded and soft as homespun, and clutching herself so tightly against the cold that her multiform earrings shook, she looked far less large; that is, she was just as small, but she had hidden the energy that had made her seem so large before under the bushel of her compact shape.

"Sylvie," he said.

"Yah." She looked away down the dark hall, and then back at him, in some kind of hurry, or in some annoyance, or something; what? "I didn't know anybody was in here. I thought it was empty."

He so obviously filled the doorway that there was no answer he could make to this.

"Okay," she said. She allowed one cold hand out from where it hid in her armpit, so it could press her lip against her teeth to be bitten, and glanced away again, as though he were compelling her to stay here and she were impatient to get away.

"Did you leave something here?" She didn't respond. "How's your son?" At this the hand that had been pressing her lip covered her mouth altogether, and she seemed to weep, or laugh, or both, still looking away though it was obvious she had no place to go; at last he saw that. "Come in," he said, and motioned her in, stepping aside so she could enter and nodding encouragement.

"Sometimes I come here," she said as she came in, "when I want to be, you know, alone." She looked around her with what Auberon supposed was a justified air of grievance. He was the intruder. He wondered if he should yield it to her, and go sleep in the street. Instead he said: "Would you like some rum?"

She appeared not to hear. "So listen," she said, and then nothing more. It would be some time before Auberon realized that these words were often as not a mere vocable in City speech, and not intended to roughly command his attention, as they seemed. He listened. She sat on the little velvet chair and said at last, as though to herself, "It's cozy here."

"Mm."

"Nice fire. What are you drinking?"

"Rum. Would you like some?"

"Sure."

There was, it appeared, only the one cup, so she and he passed it back and forth between them. "He's not my son," Sylvie said.

"I'm sorry if I . . ."

"He's my brother's kid. I got a crazy brother. Named Bruno. Like the kid." She pondered, staring into the fire. "What a kid. So sweet. And smart. And bad?" She smiled. "Just like his papo." She gripped herself more tightly, drawing her knees up almost to her breasts, and he could see she wept inwardly, and only by this constant pressure against herself kept it from spilling out.

"You and he seemed to get along well," Auberon said, nodding in what he realized was an absurdly solemn fashion. "I thought you were his mother."

"Oh, his mother, man," with a look of pure disdain touched only faintly with pity, "she's sad. She's a sad case. Pitiful." She brooded. "The way they treat him, man. He's going to turn out just like his father."

This was apparently not a good thing. Auberon wished he could think of a question that would draw the whole story from her. "Well, sons do turn out like their fathers," he said, wondering if it would ever seem true of him. "After all, they're around them a lot."

She snorted in disgust. "Shit, Bruno hasn't seen this kid in a year. Now he shows up and says, 'Hey, my son,' and all this. Just because he got religion."

"Hm."

"Not religion. But this guy he works for. Or follows. Russell—what is it, I don't know—I go blank. Anyway, he says, love, family, blahblahblah. So here he is on the doorstep."

"Hm."

"They'll kill that lad." Tears did gather in her eyes, but she blinked them away, none fell. "Damn George Mouse. How could he be so dumb?"

"What did he do?"

"He says he was drunk. Had a knife."

"Oh." There being no reflexive in the language Sylvie had to speak here, Auberon was soon lost among the "he"s and had no idea who had a knife or who said whd was drunk. He would have to hear the story twice more in the next days before he sorted out that brother Bruno had come drunk to Old Law Farm and, under the press of his new faith or philosophy, demanded nephew Bruno from George Mouse, who in Sylvie's absence and after a prolonged debate which had threatened to turn violent, had yielded him up. And that nephew Bruno was now in the hands of bedeviling and loving and deeply stupid female relatives (brother Bruno wouldn't stay, she was sure of that) who would raise him just as her brother had been raised after his father's desertion, to vanity, and wildness, a touchy ungovemability and a sweet selfishness no woman could resist, and few men for that matter; and that (even if the child avoided being put in a Home) Sylvie's plan to rescue him had failed: George had forbidden the Farm to her relatives, he had enough troubles.

"So I can't live with him any more," she said—George this time, doubtless.

A strange hope rose in Auberon.

"I mean it's not his fault," she said. "Not his fault, really. I just couldn't any more. I'd always think of it. And anyway." She pressed her temples, pressing in the thing there. "Shit. If I had the nerve to tell them off. All of them." Her grief and bedevilment were reaching a climax. "I never want to see them again myself. Never. Never never." She almost laughed. "And that's really stupid, 'cause if I leave here I got no place else to go. No place else."

She wouldn't weep. She hadn't, and the moment was past now; now blank despair was in her face as she looked into the fire, both cheeks in her hands.

Auberon clasped his hands behind him, studied an offhand, neighborly tone, and said, "Well of course you can stay here, you're welcome to," and realized he was offering her a place which was much more hers than his, and flushed. "I mean of course you can stay here, if you don't mind my staying too."

She looked at him, warily he thought, which was proper considering a certain bass obbligato in his feelings just then which he was in fact trying to conceal. "Really?" she said. She smiled. "I wouldn't take up much room."

"Well, there's not much room to take up." Become host, he looked the place over thoughtfully. "I don't know how we'd arrange it, but there's the chair, and, well, there's my overcoat almost dry, you could use that for a blanket. . . ." He saw that he himself, curled up in a corner, would probably not sleep at all. Now, though, her face had closed somewhat at these cheerless arrangements. He couldn't think what else to yield up to her.

"I couldn't," she said, "have just a corner of the bed? Like down at the foot? I'll curl up real small."

"Bed?"

"The bed!" she said, growing impatient.

"What bed?"

Suddenly getting it, she laughed aloud. "Oh wow," she said, "oh no, you were going to sleep on the flaw—I don't believe it!" She went to the massy wardrobe or highboy which stood against one wall, and, reaching up along its hidden side, she turned a knob or pulled a lever, and enormously pleased, let down the whole tall front of the thing. Counterweighted (the dummy drawers held lead weights), it swung gently, dreamily down; the mirror reflected floor, and then was gone; brass knobs at each upper corner extruded themselves, slipping out as the front came down, and became legs, locking in place by a gravity-worked mechanism whose ingenuity he would later marvel at. It was a bed. It had a carved headboard; the top of it, as wardrobe, had become the footboard, as bed; it had a mattress, bedclothes, and two plump pillows.

He laughed with her. Displayed, the bed took up most the room. The folding bed room.

"Isn't it great?" she said.

"Great."

"Room enough for two, isn't there?"

"Oh sure. In fact . . ." He was about to offer the whole of it to her; that was only right, and he would instantly have done so in the first place if he'd known it to be hidden there. But he saw that she assumed he was ungentlemanly enough to assume that she would be grateful for half, and assumed that he assumed that she. . . A sudden cunning shut his mouth.

"You're sure you don't mind?" she asked.

"Oh no. If you're sure you don't mind."

"Nah. I've always slept with people. My granny and I slept together for years, usually with my sister too." She sat on the bed—it was so plumply high she had to hoist herself up with her hands, and her feet didn't reach the floor from it—and smiled at him, and he smiled back. "So," she said.

The room transformed was the rest of his life transformed, everything not already metamorphosed by the departure and the bus and the City and the lawyers and the rain. Nothing now would ever be the same again. He realized he had been staring wildly at her, and that she had lowered her eyes. "Well," he said, holding up the cup, "how about a little more of this?"

"Okay." While he was pouring it, she said, "So how come you came to the City, by the way?"

"To seek my fortune."

"Huh?"

"Well, I want to be a writer." Rum and intimacy made it easy to say. "I'm going to look for a job writing. Something. Maybe television."

"Hey, great. Big bucks."

"Mm."

"You could write, like, 'A World Elsewhere'?"

"What's that?"

"You know. The show."

He didn't. An absurdity in his ambitions became clear to him when they bounced back, as it were, from Sylvie, instead of (as they always had before) paying out endlessly into futurity. "Actually, we never had a television set," he said.

"Really? Well, I'll be." She sipped the rum he gave her. "Couldn't afford one? George told me you guys were real rich. Oops."

"Well, 'rich'. I don't know about 'rich' . . . ." Well! There was an inflection like Smoky's, which Auberon heard for the first time in his own voice—that putting of imaginary doubt-quotes around a word. Was he growing old? "We could have bought a TV, certainly. . . . What's this show like?"

"'A World Elsewhere'? It's a daytime drama."

"Oh."

"The endless kind. You just get over one problem and another starts. Mostly dumb. But you get hooked." She had begun to tremble again, and drew her feet up on the bed; she pulled down the quilt and wrapped it around her legs. Auberon busied himself with the fire. "There's a girl on it who reminds me of me." She said it with a self-deprecating laugh. "Boy has she got problems. She's supposed to be Italian, but she's played by a P.R. And she's beautiful." She said this as though she said She has one leg, and is like me in that. "And she has a Destiny. She knows it. All these terrible problems, but she has a Destiny, and sometimes they show her just looking out mistyeyed while these voices sing in the background—aa-aa-aaah—and you know she's thinking of her Destiny."

"Hm." All the wood in the woodbox was scrap, most of it parts of furniture, though there were pieces that bore lettering too. The varnish on fluted and turned wood sizzled and blistered. Auberon felt an exhilaration: he was part of a community of strangers, burning unbeknown to them their furniture and belongings, just as they not knowing him took his money at change-booths and made room for him on buses. "A Destiny, huh."

"Yah." She looked at the locomotive on the lampshade, turning through its little landscape. "I have a Destiny," she said.

"You do?"

"Yah." She said this syllable in a way and with an attitude of face and arms that meant Yes, it's true, and a long story, and while possibly to my credit is something I have nothing to do with, and is even a little embarrassing, like a halo. She studied a silver ring on her finger.

"How does somebody know," he asked, "that they have a Destiny?" The bed was so large that to sit in the little velvet chair at its foot would place him absurdly low; so—gingerly—he got up on the bed beside her. She made room. They took up opposite corners, resting in the wings which protruded from the headboard.

"An espiritista read mine," Sylvie said. "A long time ago."

"A who?"

"An espiritista. A lady with powers. You know. Reads cards, and does stuff with stuff from the botanica; a bruja sort of, you know?"

"Oh."

"This one was sort of an aunt of mine, well not really mine, I forget whose aunt she was; we called her Tití, but everybody called her La Negra. She scared the shit out of me. Her apartment, way uptown, always had candles lit on these little altars, and the curtains drawn, and these crazy smells; and out on the fire escape she kept a couple of chickens, man, I don't know what she did with those chickens and I don't want to know. She was big—not fat, but with these long strong gorilla arms and a little head, and black, Sort of blue-black, you know? She couldn't have really been in my family. So when I was a little kid I got malnutritioned real bad—wouldn't eat—Mami couldn't make me—I got so skinny, like this—" she held up a red-nailed pinkie. "The doctor said I was supposed to eat liver. Liver! Can you imagine? Anyway, Granny decided that somebody was maybe doing a number on me, you know? Brujeria. From a distance." She waggled her fingers like a stage hypnotist. "Like revenge or something. Mami was living with somebody else's husband then. So maybe his wife had got an espiritista to do revenge on her by making me sick. Anyway, anyway. . ." She touched his arm lightly, because he had looked away. In fact she touched his arm every time he looked away, which had begun somewhat to annoy him, his attention couldn't have been more riveted; he thought this must be a bad habit of hers, until much later he saw that the men who played dominoes on the street and the women who watched children and gossiped on stoops did it too: a racial, not a personal habit, maintain the contact. "Anyway. She took me to La Negra to get it wiped out or whatever. Man I was never so scared in my life. She started pressing me and feeling me up with these big black hands, and sort of groaning or singing, and talking this stuff, and her eyeballs rolled back in her head and her eyelids fluttered—creepy. Then she dashes over to this little burner and throws some stuff on it, powder or something, and this real strong perfume comes out, and she rushes back—sort of dances—and feels me some more. She did some other stuff too that I forget. Then she drops all that, and gets real regular, like, you know, a day's work, all done, like at the dentist; and she told Granny, no, nobody had a spell on me, I was just skinny and ought to eat more. Granny was so relieved. So—" again the brief wrist-touch, he had stared into the mug for a moment "—so they're sitting around drinking coffee and Granny's paying, and La Negra just kept looking at me. Just looking. Man I was freaking out. What's she looking at? She could see right through you, she could see your heart. Your heart of hearts. Then she goes like this—" Sylvie motioned with a slow large black bruja hand for the child to come close "—and starts talking to me, real slow, about what dreams I had, and other stuff I forget; and it's like she was thinking real hard. Then she gets out this deck of cards, real old and worn out; and she puts my hand on them and her hand over mine; and her eyes roll up again, and she's like in a trance." Sylvie took the cup from Auberon, who'd been gripping it, in a trance himself. "Oh," she said. "No more?"

"Lots more." He went to get some.

"So listen, listen. She lays out these cards—thanks—" She sipped, her eyes rising, looking for a moment like the child she was telling of. "And she starts reading them for me. That was when she saw my Destiny."

"And what was it?" He sat again beside her on the bed. "A big one."

"The biggest," she said, mimicking a confidential, hotnews tone. "The very biggest." She laughed. "She couldn't believe it. This skinny, malnutritioned kid in a homemade dress. This big Destiny. She stared and stared. She stared at the cards, she stared at me. My eyes got big, and I thought I was going to cry, and Granny's praying, and La Negra's making noises, and I just wanted out. . . ."

"But what," Auberon said, "was the Destiny? Exactly."

"Well, exactly she didn't know." She laughed, the whole thing had become silly. "That's the only trouble. She said a Destiny, and a biggie. But not what. A movie stah. A queen. Queen of the World, man. Anything." As quickly as she had laughed, she grew thoughtful. "It sure ain't come true yet," she said. "I used to picture it, though. Like in the future, coming true. I had this picture. There was this table, in the woods? Like a long banquet table. With a white cloth. And all these goodies on it. End to end, heaped up. But in the woods. Trees and stuff around. And there was an empty place at the middle of the table."

"And?"

"That's all. I just saw it. I thought about it." She glanced over at him. "I bet you never knew anybody who had any big Destiny before," she said, grinning.

He didn't want to say that he had hardly known anyone who didn't. Destiny had been like a shameful secret shared among all of them at Edgewood, which none of them would exactly admit to except in the most veiled terms and only at great need. He had fled his. He had outrun it, he was sure, like the geese outrunning Brother North-wind on strong wings: it couldn't freeze him here. If he wanted a Destiny now, it would be one of his own choosing. He'd like, for instance, for a single simple instance, to have Sylvie's: to be Sylvie's. "Is it fun?" he asked. "Having a Destiny?"

"Not much," she said. She had begun to clutch herself again, though the fire had heated the little room well. "When I was a kid, they all made fun of me for it. Except Granny. But she couldn't resist going around telling everybody about it. And La Negra told. And I was still just a bad skinny kid who didn't do shit that was wonderful." She wiggled within the bedclothes, embarrassed, and turned the silver ring on her finger. "Sylvie's big Destiny. There was a lot of jokes. Once—" she looked away "—once this real old Gypsy guy came around. Mami didn't want to let him in, but he said he'd come all the way from Brooklyn to see me. So he comes in. All bent and sweaty, and real fat. And talking this funny Spanish. And they dragged me out, and showed me off. I was eating a chicken wing. And he stared at me a while with these big goggle eyes and his mouth open. Then—oh, man, it was weird—he got down on his knees—it took him a long time, you know?—and he says: Remember me when you come into your kingdom. And he gave me this." She held up her hand (the palm lined minutely and clearly) and turned it to show the silver ring, back and front. "Then we all had to help him stand up."

"And then?"

"He went back to Brooklyn." She paused, remembering him. "Man I didn't like him." She laughed. "As he was leaving, I put the chicken wing in his pocket. He didn't see. In his coat pocket. In exchange for the ring."

"A wing for a ring."

"Yeah." She laughed, but soon ceased. She seemed restless and plagued again. Changeful: as though her weather blew faster, fair to foul to fair again, than most people's did. "So big deal," she said. "Forget it." She drank, quickly and deeply, and then exhaled rapidly and waved her hand before her open mouth to cool the rum-flames. She gave him the cup and dug more deeply into the bedclothes. "What has it ever got me. I can't even take care of myself. Much less anybody else." Her voice had grown faint; she turned away, and seemed to be trying to disappear; then she rolled back, and yawned hugely. He could see her mouth's interior: her arched tongue, even her uvula. Not the pale rosebud color of white people's interior parts, but a richer color, tinged with coral. He wondered. . . "That kid was probably lucky," she said when she was done. "To get away from me."

"I can't believe that," he said. "You got along so well."

She answered nothing, only stared at her thoughts. "I wish," she said, but then no more. He wished he could think of something to offer her. Besides everything. "Well," he said, "you can stay here as long as you want. As long as you want."

Suddenly she flung off the covers and scrambled across the bed, getting away, and he had a wild impulse to grab her, restrain her. "Pipi," she said. She climbed over his legs, and down to the floor, and pulled open the door of the closet (it opened only wide enough to admit her before striking the edge of the bed) and turned on a light within.

He heard her unzip. "Wow! That seat is cold!" There was a pause, and then the hollow hiss of number one. She said when she was done: "You're a nice guy, you know that?" And any answer he might have made to that (he had none to make) was drowned in the roar of waters as she pulled the chain.


Gate of Horn

Preparing for their mutual bed was a lot of laughs (he made a joke about sleeping with a naked sword between them that she thought hilarious, never having heard of the thing before) but when the locomotive was stilled and darkness around them, he heard her weep, softly, smothering her tears, far away on her allotted side of the bed.

He supposed that really neither of them would sleep; but after long search, on this side and then that, after crying out (Ah! Ah!) softly several times as though frightened by her thoughts, Sylvie did find a pathway to the gate of horn; the tears were dry on her black lashes; she was asleep. In her struggle she had wound the bedclothes tortuously around herself, and he didn't dare extract much (not knowing that once passed to the other side she was as good as dead for hours). For sleeping she wore a T-shirt, intended as a souvenir for tourists' children, which showed garish and inaccurate pictures of four or five big City attractions, nothing but this and a pair of panties, patches of black silk on an elastic and no bigger than a blindfold. He lay awake next to her for a long time while her breathing grew regular. He slept briefly, and dreamed that her child's shirt, and her great grief, and the bedclothes twisted protectively around her brown limbs, and the deliberate high sexiness of her nearly nonexistent underwear, were a rebus. He laughed, dreaming, to see the simple puns contained in these items, and the surprising but obvious answer, and his own laugh awoke him.

With the stealth of one of Daily Alice's cats trying to find the warmth and not disturb the sleeper, his arm worked its way under the blankets and over her. For a long time he lay that way, still and wary. He half-dreamt again, this time that his arm, through contact with her, was turning slowly to gold. He woke, and found it asleep, heavy and dead. He withdrew it; it sprouted pins and needles; he caressed it, forgetting why it and not the other should appear in his mind as valuable; slept again. Woke again. She had grown greatly heavy beside him, seemed to weight her side of the bed like a treasure, the richer for its compactness, and richer still for being all unconscious of itself.

When at last he slept for real, though, it was of nothing in Old Law Farm that he dreamt, but of his earliest childhood, of Edgewood and of Lilac.