Little, Big

II.

Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss.

—Milton

What Smoky liked about his girls' growing up was that, though they moved away from him, they did so (it seemed to him) less from any distaste or boredom than simply to accommodate a growth in their own lives: when they were kids, their lives and concerns—Tacey's rabbits and music, Lily's bird's-nests and boy-friends, Lucy's bewilderments—could all fit within the compass of his life, which was then replete; and then as they grew up and out, they no longer fit, they needed room, their concerns multiplied, lovers and then children had to be fitted in, he could no longer contain them unless he expanded too, and so he did, and so his own life got larger as theirs did, and he felt them to be no further from him than ever, and he liked that. What he didn't like about their growing up was the same thing: that it forced him to grow, to enlarge, sometimes beyond what he felt the character he had come over the years to be encased in could stand.


Tossing and Turning

There had been one great advantage in having grown up anonymous when he had come to have children: for they could make out of him what they wanted, could think him kindly or strict, evasive or frank, jolly or glum, as their own tempers required. That was great, great to be Universal Father, nothing withheld from him, he bet (though he had no way to prove it) that his daughters had told him more of their secrets, grave, shameful, or hilarious, than most men's did. But there were limits even to his flexibility, he couldn't as time went on stretch as much as he had once done, he found himself less and less able to ignore it when his character, growing ever more lobsterlike and unsheddable, disapproved of or could not understand the Young.

Perhaps it was chiefly that which had come between him and his youngest child, his son Auberon. Certainly the commonest emotions Smoky remembered feeling about the boy were a sort of baffled irritation, and a sadness over the mysterious gulf that seemed fixed between them. Whenever he got up the nerve to try to learn what was with his son, Auberon had produced a complex and wellpracticed secretiveness that Smoky was helpless and even bored before; when Auberon had come to him, on the other hand, Smoky had seemed unable not to retreat into a bluff, know-nothing, standard-issue parent costume, and Auberon would too quickly retire. And it had grown not better but worse as the years went by, until at last Smoky, with outward head-shaking and reluctance, and inward relief, had seen him off on his strange quest to the City.

Maybe if they'd played ball more. Just gone out, son and dad, and tossed the old pill around on a summer afternoon. Auberon had always liked to play ball, Smoky knew, though he himself had never been either good at it or happy doing it.

He laughed at the insufficiency of this reverie. Just the sort of thing his character might suggest, in the face of his children's inexplicability. Maybe, though, it had occurred to him because he sensed that some common touch, some ordinary gesture, might have crossed over what lay between him and his son; if there were something as wide that lay between him and his daughters, he had never noticed it, but of course it might well be there, disguised in the daily strangenesses of growing up today with a father who had grown up yesterday, or even the day before that.

None of his daughters had married, or seemed likely to, though he had now two grandchildren, Lily's twins, and Tacey seemed ready to bear a child by Tony Buck. Smoky held no particular brief for marriage, though he couldn't imagine life without his own, odd as it had proved to be; and as for fidelity, he had no right to speak at all. But he did find it distressing to think that his offspring would be more or less nameless, and that if this kept up might one day be describable only as race-horses are, by so-and-so out of soand-so. And he couldn't help thinking that there was something embarrassingly obvious in the couplings of his daughters with their lovers, a shamelessness that marriage would have decently hid. Or rather his character thought so. Smoky himself mostly cheered their daring, their bravery, and wasn't ashamed to admire their sexuality as he had always admired their beauty. Big girls now, after all. But still . . . well, he hoped they could ignore it when his character made noises, or caused him, for instance, to decline to visit Tacey and what's-his-name when they were living together in a cave. A cave! His children seemed bent on recapitulating in their own lives the whole history of the race. Lucy gathered herbs for simples and Lucy read the stars and hung coral around her babies' necks to ward off evil; Auberon with a knapsack set out to seek his fortune. And in her cave Tacey discovered fire. Just when the supply of electricity in the world seemed to be running out for good, too. Thinking of which, he listened to the clock chime the quarter hour, and wondered if he should go down and shut down the generator.

He yawned. The single lamp lit in the library made a pool of light he was reluctant to leave. There was a pile of books by his chair from which he had been choosing for school; the old ones had grown repulsive to the hand and eye from years of use, and boring beyond expression. Another clock chimed, one o'clock, but Smoky didn't trust it. Outside in the corridor, a candle in her hand, a familiar wraith of nighttime passed: Sophie, still awake.

She went away—Smoky watched the changeful light on walls and furniture flash and dim—and then came back again.

"You still up?" she said, and at the same moment he asked the same of her.

"It's awful," she said, coming in. She wore a long white nightgown which gave her even more the air of an unlaid ghost. "Tossing and turning. Do you know that feeling? As though your mind's asleep but your body's awake—and won't give in—and has to keep jumping from one position to another. . . ."

"Just barely waking you up every time . . ."

"Yes, so your head can't—can't dive down, sort of, and really sleep, but it won't give up either and wake up, and just keeps repeating the same dream, or the beginnings of one, and not getting anywhere. . . ."

"Sorting over and over the same handful of nonsense, yup; until you have to give in, and get up. . . ."

"Yes, yes! And you feel like you've been lying there for hours, struggling, and not sleeping at all. Isn't that awful?"

"Awful." He felt, but would never admit to, a sense of fitness that Sophie, long the champion sleeper, had come in recent years to be a fair insomniac, and knew now even better than Smoky, a chancy sleeper at the best of times, the pursuit of fleeing oblivion. "Cocoa," he said. "Warm milk. With a little brandy. And say your prayers." He'd given her all this advice before.

She knelt by his chair, covering her hare feet with the nightgown, and rested her head on his thigh. "I thought," she said, "when I sort of snapped out of it, you know, the tossing and turning? I thought: she must be cold."

"She?" he said. And then: "Oh."

"Isn't that dumb? If she's alive, she's not cold, probably; and if she's—well, not alive . . ."

"Mm." There was, there was Lilac, of course: he had been thinking with such self-satisfaction of how well he knew his daughters, and how well they liked him, his son Auberon the only grain of grit in his oyster: but there was his other daughter, his life was odder than it often appeared to him, Lilac was a dimension of mystery and grief he sometimes forgot. Sophie never forgot.

"You know what's funny?" Sophie said. "Years ago, I used to think of her growing up. I knew she got older. I could feel it. I knew just what she looked like, how she'd look as she got older. But then it stopped. She got to be about . . . nine, or ten, I guess; and then I couldn't imagine her getting any older."

Smoky answered nothing, only stroked Sophie's head softly.

"She'd be twenty-two now. Think of that."

He thought of it. He had (twenty-two years ago) sworn before his wife that her sister's child would be his, all the responsibility his. Her disappearance hadn't altered that, but it had left him with no duties. He couldn't imagine how to search for the real Lilac lost, when he had at length been told that she was lost, and Sophie had hid her awful ordeal with the false Lilac from him, and from all of them. He still didn't know how it had ended: Sophie was gone for a day, and when she returned there was no more Lilac, false or true; she took to her bed, a cloud was lifted from the house, and a sadness entered it. That's all. He was not to ask.

So much not to ask. It was a great art, that one. He had learned to deploy it as skillfully as a surgeon his art, or a poet his. To listen; to nod; to act on what he was told as though he understood it; not to offer criticism or advice, except of the mildest kind, just to show his interest and concern; to puzzle out. To stroke Sophie's hair, and not try to deflect her sadness; to wonder how she had gone on with such a life, with such a sorrow at its heart, and never ask.

Well, if it came to that, though, his other three daughters were as great a mystery to him, really, as his fourth, only not a mystery it grieved him to contemplate. Queens of air and darkness, how had he come to engender them? And his wife: only he had so long ceased (since his honeymoon, since his wedding day) to question her that she was now no more a mystery (and no less) than clouds and stones and roses. If it came to that, the only one he could begin to understand (and criticize, and intrude on, and study) was his only son.

"Why do you suppose that is?" Sophie asked.

"Why what is?"

"That I can't imagine her getting any older."

"Well, hm," Smoky said. "I don't really know."

She sighed, and Smoky stroked her head, running his fingers through her curls, sorting them out. They would never exactly go gray; though the gold faded from them, they still seemed like golden curls. Sophie was not one of those maiden aunts whose unused beauty comes to seem dried and pressed, like a flower—for one thing she was no maiden—but it did seem that her youth couldn't be outgrown, that she had never and would never become a person of mature years. Daily Alice looked now, at almost fifty (fifty, good Lord) just as she ought, as though she had shed the successive skins of childhood and youth and come forth thus, whole. Sophie looked sixteen: only burdened with a lot of unnecessary years, almost unfairly, it seemed. Smoky wondered which, over the years, he had oftenest thought the more beautiful. "Maybe you need another Interest," he said.

"I don't need another Interest," she said. "I need to sleep."

It had been Smoky who, when Sophie had discovered with surprise and disgust how many hours there are in the day when it isn't half-filled with sleep, had said that most people fill those hours with Interests of some kind, and had suggested Sophie take some up. Out of desperation she'd done so; the cards, of course, first, and when she wasn't working with them she gardened, and paid visits, canned, read books by the dozen, made repairs around the house, always resenting that these Interests should be forced on her in the absence of her lost (why? why lost?) sweet sleep. She turned her head restlessly on Smoky's thigh as though it were her unquiet pillow. Then she looked up at him. "Will you sleep with me?" she said. "I mean sleep."

"Let's make cocoa," he said.

She got up. "It seems so unfair," she said, casting her eyes upward at the ceiling. "All of them up there fast asleep and I have to haunt the place."

But in fact—besides Smoky leading the way by candlelight to the kitchen—Momdy had just awakened with arthritic pains, and was thinking whether it would hurt more to get up and get aspirin or lie there and ignore them; and Tacey and Lucy had never gone to bed at all, but sat up by candlelight in quiet talk about their lovers and friends and family, about the fate of their brother and the shortcomings and virtues of the sister not present, Lily. Lily's twins had just awakened, one because he'd wet the bed, and the other because she felt the wetness, and their wakefulness was about to wake Lily. The only one asleep then in the house was Daily Alice, who lay on her stomach with her head deep in two feather pillows, dreaming of a hill where there stood an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace.


La Negra

On a winter day, Sylvie paid a visit to her old neighborhood, where she had not lived since her mother had gone back to the Island and farmed Sylvie out to aunts. In a furnished room down that street, with her mother, her brother, a child of her mother's, her grandmother and the odd visitor, Sylvie had grown, and grown Somehow the Destiny that she had today brought back with her to these littered streets.

Though only a few subway stops away from Old Law Farm, it seemed a great distance, across a border, another country altogether; so dense was the City that it could contain many such foreign countries cheek by jowl; there were several which Sylvie had never visited at all, their old Dutch or quaintly rural names suggestive and remote to her. But these blocks she knew. Hands in the pockets of her old black fur, double socks on her feet, she went down streets she walked often in her dreams, and they weren't much different than she dreamed them to be, they were preserved as though in memory: the landmarks by which she had mapped them as a child were mostly still there, the candy store, the evangelical church where women with moustaches and powdered faces sang hymns, the squalid credit grocer, the notaria scary and dark. She found, by following these markers, the building where the woman called La Negra lived; and though it was smaller, dirtier, with darker and more urinous hallways than it had been or than she remembered it, it was the same, and her heart beat fast with apprehension as she tried to remember what door was hers. From out an apartment, as she climbed up, a family argument accompanied by jíbaro music suddenly burst, husband, wife, crying children, mother-in-law. He was drunk, and going out to get drunker; the wife railed at him, the mother-inlaw railed at the wife, the music sang of love. Sylvie asked where La Negra's house was. They all fell silent, all but the radio, and pointed upward, studying Sylvie. "Thanks," she said, and went up; behind her the sextet (well and long rehearsed) resumed.

From behind her door studded with locks La Negra questioned Sylvie, unable, apparently, despite her powers, to place her. Then Sylvie remembered that La Negra had known her only by a childhood diminutive, and she gave that. There was a shocked silence (Sylvie could sense it) and the locks were opened.

"I thought you were gone," the black woman said, eyes wide, mouth corners drawn down in fearful surprise.

"Well, I am," Sylvie said. "Years ago."

"I mean far," La Negra said. "Far, far."

"No," Sylvie said. "Not so far."

She herself was a shock to Sylvie, for she had grown a lot smaller, and a lot less fearsome as she was smaller. Her hair had grown gray as steel wool. But the apartment, when La Negra at last stood aside and let Sylvie enter, was the same: mostly a smell, or many smells together, that brought back, as though she inhaled them with the odors, the fear and wonder she had felt here.

"Tití," she said, touching the old woman's arm (for La Negra still stared at her in something like surprise and didn't speak), "Tití, I need some help."

"Yes," La Negra said. "Anything."

But Sylvie, looking around the small, small apartment, was less sure than she had been an hour ago about what help she wanted. "Gee, the same," she said. There was the bureau, done up as a composite altar, with the chipped statues of black Santa Barbara and black Martin de Porres, the red candles lit before them, the plastic lace tablecloth beneath; there was the picture of Our Lady pouring blessings that turned to roses into the gas-flame-colored sea. On another wall was the Guardian Angel picture which also hung, oddly, on George Mouse's kitchen wall: the dangerous bridge, the two children, the potent angel watching to see that they crossed safely. "Who's that?" Sylvie asked. Between the saints, before the talismanic hand, was a picture shrouded in black silk, a candle before it also, burning low.

"Come sit, come sit," La Negra said quickly. "She's not being punished, even if it looks like it. I never meant that."

Sylvie decided not to question this. "Oh, hey, I brought some stuff." She offered the bag, some fruit, some dulces, some coffee she had begged from George, who got it when no one else could, for she had remembered her aunt drinking it with relish, hot white and sweet.

La Negra, blessing her profusely, grew easier. When she had, as a precaution, taken the glass of water she kept on the bureau to catch evil spirits in and flushed it down the noisy toilet and replaced it, they made the coffee and talked about old things, Sylvie in her nervousness rattling on a little.

"So I heard from your mother," La Negra said. "She called long-distance. Not me. But I heard. And your father."

"He's not my father," Sylvie said, dismissively.

"Well . . ."

"Just somebody my mother married." She smiled at her aunt. "I got no father."

"Ay, bendita."

"A virgin birth," Sylvie said, "just ask my mother," and then, though laughing, clapped her hand over her mouth at the blasphemy.

Coffee made, they drank it and ate the dulces, and Sylvie told her aunt why she had come: to get the Destiny that once upon a time La Negra had seen in the cards and in her child's palm removed from her: to have it pulled, like a tooth.

"See, I met this man," she said, looking down, suddenly shy to feel the warmth that bloomed in her heart. "And I love him, and . . ."

"Is he rich?" La Negra asked.

"I don't know, I think his family is, sort of."

"Then," her aunt said, "maybe he's the Destiny."

"Ay, tití," Sylvie said. "He's not that rich."

"Well . . ."

"But I love him," Sylvie said. "And I don't want some big Destiny coming along and snatching me away from him."

"Ay, no," La Negra said, "but where would it go? If it left you."

"I don't know," Sylvie said. "Couldn't we just throw it away.

La Negra slowly shook her head, her eyes growing round. Sylvie felt suddenly both afraid and foolish. Wouldn't it have been easier to simply cease believing that any destiny was hers; or to believe that love was as high a destiny as anyone could want or have, and which she did have? What if messing in it with spells and potions didn't ward it off at all, but only turned it bitter, and sour, and cost her love as well. . . . "I don't know, I don't know," she said. "All I know is that I love him, and that's enough; I want to be with him, and be good to him, and make him rice and beans and have his babies and . . . and just go on and on."

"I'll do what you ask," La Negra said in a low voice that didn't sound like hers. "Whatever you ask."

Sylvie looked at her, a frisson of blue magic stealing up her spine. The old black woman sat in her chair as though enervated, her eyes not leaving Sylvie but not quite seeing her either. "Well," Sylvie said doubtfully. "Like the time you came to our house, and put the evil spirits on a coconut, and rolled them out the door? And down the hall and out to the garbage?" She had told this story to Auberon, laughing uproariously over it with him, but here it didn't seem funny. "Tití?" she said. But her aunt (though sitting in her plastic-covered armchair all the time) was no longer there.

No, the Destiny could not be put on a coconut, it was too heavy; it could not be rubbed away with oils or washed off in herbbaths, it went too deep. La Negra, if she were to do what Sylvie commanded, if her old heart could bear it, would have to draw it from Sylvie and swallow it herself. Where was it, first of all? She approached Sylvie's heart with careful steps. Most of these doors she knew: love, money, health, children. That portal there, ajar, she didn't know. "Bueno, bueno," she said, desperately afraid that when the Destiny she let out of Sylvie rushed upon her it would kill her, or so transform her that she might as well be dead. Her spirit guides, when she turned to look for them, had fled in terror. And yet she must do what Sylvie had commanded. She put her hand on the door, and began to open it, glimpsing a golden daylight beyond, a rush of wind, the murmur of many voices.

"No!" Sylvie shouted. "No, no, no, I was wrong, don't!"

The portal slammed shut. La Negra, with heart-sickening vertigo, tumbled back into her armchair in her little apartment. Sylvie was shaking her.

"I take it back, I take it back!" Sylvie cried. But it hadn't ever left her.

La Negra, recovering, patted her heaving breast with her hand. "Don't ever do that again, child," she said, weak with relief that Sylvie had done it this time. "You could kill a person."

"I'm sorry, sorry," Sylvie said, "but this was all just a big mistake. . . ."

"Rest, rest," La Negra said, still immobile in the chair, watching Sylvie scramble into her coat. "Rest." But Sylvie wanted only to get out of this room, where strong currents of brujeria seemed to play around her like lightning; she was desperately sorry she'd even thought of this move and hoping against hope that her foolishness hadn't wounded her Destiny, or caused it to turn on her, or waked it at all, why hadn't she just let it sleep where it lay, peaceful, not bothering anybody? Her invaded heart thudded reproachfully, she pulled out her purse with trembling fingers, looking for the wadded bills she had brought to pay for this crazy operation.

La Negra drew away from the money Sylvie offered her as though it might sting her. If Sylvie had offered her gold coins, potent herbs, a medallion heavy with power, a book of secrets, she would have taken them, she had passed the test put to her and deserved something: but not dirty bills for buying groceries, not money passed through a thousand hands.

Out on the street, hurrying away, Sylvie thought: I'm all right, I'm all right; and hoped that it was so. Sure she could have her Destiny removed; she could cut off her nose, too. No, it was with her for good, she was still burdened with it, and if not glad to be then glad anyway that it hadn't been taken from her; and though she still knew little enough of it she had learned one thing when La Negra had tried to open her, one thing that made her hurry fast away, searching for a train station that would take her downtown: she had learned that whatever her Destiny was, Auberon was in it. And for sure she would not want it at all if he were not.

La Negra rose heavily from her armchair, still baffled. Had that been she? It could not have been, not in the flesh, not unless all of La Negra's calculations were wrong; yet there on the table lay the fruits she had brought, and the half-eaten dulces.

But if that had been her who had been with La Negra just now, then who was it who had these many years helped La Negra in her prayers and spells? If she was still here, untransmogrified still in the same City La Negra inhabited, then how could she, at La Negra's invocation, have cured, and told truths, and brought lovers together?

She went to her bureau and drew off the scrap of black silk that covered the central image of her spirit altar. She half-expected it to be gone, but it was there: an old cracked photograph, an apartment much like the one La Negra stood in; a birthday party, and a dark, skinny, pigtailed girl seated (on a thick phone book no doubt) behind her cake, a paper crown on her head, her large eyes compelling and weirdly wise.

Was she so old now, La Negra wondered, that she could no longer tell spirits from flesh, visitors from visitations? And if that were so, what might it portend for her practice?

She lit a fresh candle, and pressed it down into the red glass before the picture.


The Seventh Saint

Long years before, George Mouse had showed the City to Auberon's father, making him a City man; now Sylvie did the same for Auberon. But this was a changed town. The difficulties that everywhere had been cropping up in even the best laid plans of men, the inexplicable yet Somehow inevitable failure that seemed built into their manifold schemes, were sharpest in the City, and caused the greatest pain and anger there—the fixed anger Smoky hadn't seen but which Auberon saw in nearly every City face he looked into.

For the City, even more than the nation, lived on Change: rapid, ruthless, always for the better. Change was the lifeblood of the City, the animator of all dreams there, the power that coursed in the veins of the men of the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club, the fire that boiled up wealth and bustle and satisfaction. The City Auberon came to, though, had slowed. The quick eddies of fashion had grown sluggish; the great waves of enterprise had become a still lagoon. The permanent depression that the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club struggled against but was unable to reverse began in this grinding-to-a-halt, this unwonted cumbersome loginess of the greatest City, and spread outward from it in slow ripples of weary exhaustion to benumb the republic. Except in small ways (and that as constantly and pointlessly as ever) the City had stopped changing: the City Smoky knew had changed utterly, had changed by ceasing to change.

Sylvie assembled from the aged pile a city fcr Auberon's mind's eye that would anyway have been very different from the one George built for Smoky. A landlord, however odd, and an old, even a charter member (on his grandfather's side) of the great changer families, George Mouse felt the decline in his beloved Apple, and was sometimes bitter, and sometimes indignant at it. But Sylvie had come from a different strain, from what had been in Smoky's time the dark underside of a glamorous dream, and was now (though still raddled with violence and desperation) its least depressed enclave. The last cheerful streets of the City were the streets where the people lived who had always been at the changers' mercy, and who now, in the midst of everyone else's sense of decline into stagnancy and irremediable mess, lived much as they always had, only with a longer history and a surer tradition: hand-to-mouth, day to day, with a musical accompaniment.

She took him to the clean, crowded apartments of her relatives, where he sat on the plastic coverings of outlandish furniture and was given glasses of iceless soda (not good to chill the blood, they thought) set in saucers, and inedible dulces, and listened to himself praised in Spanish: a good husband, they thought, for Sylvie, and though she objected to the honorific they went on using it for decency's sake. He was confused by the many and, to his ear, similar-sounding diminutives used among them. Sylvie, for reasons she remembered but he could never keep straight, was called Tati by some members of the family, a branch that included the dark aunt not-really-an-aunt who had read Sylvie's Destiny, the aunt called La Negra. Tati in some child's mouth had become Tita, which had also stuck, and which in its turn became (a grand diminutive) Titania. Often enough Auberon didn't know that the subject of anecdotes told him in hilarious Spanglish was his own beloved under another name.

"They think you're great," Sylvie said to him after a visit, out on the street, her hand thrust deep into his overcoat pocket where he held it for warmth.

"Well, they're very nice too. . . ."

"But papo, I was so embarrassed when you put your feet up on that—esta thing—that coffee-table thing."

"Oh?"

"That was very bad. Everybody noticed."

"Well, why the hell didn't you say something?" he said, embarrassed. "I mean at home we lay all over the furniture, and it was . . ." He stopped himself from saying And it was real furniture, but she heard it anyway.

"I tried to tell you. I was looking at you. I mean I couldn't say, Hey take your feet off that. They'd think I treated you like Tití Juana treats Enrico." Enrico was a henpecked husband, and a laughingstock. "You don't know what they go through to get that ugly stuff," she said. "It costs a lot, believe it or not, muebles like that." They were silent a while, bent into a cruel wind. Muebles, he thought, "movables," strange formal-sounding language for such a people. She said, "They're all crazy. I mean some of them are crazy crazy. But they're all crazy."

He knew that, for all the great affection she had for her complex family, she was trying desperately to extricate herself from the long, almost Jacobean tragicomedy of their common life, charged as it was with madness, farce, corrosive love, even murder, even ghosts. In the night she would often toss and turn, and cry out in anguish, imagining terrible things that might, or might have already, happened to one or another of that accident-prone crowd; and often, though Auberon dismissed them as night terrors (for nothing—not one thing he knew of—had ever happened in his family's life that could be called terrible), her imaginings were not far from wrong. She hated it that they were in danger; she hated to be bound to them; her own Destiny shone like a flaring lamp amid their hopeless confusions, always just about to gutter, or be blown out, but still alight.

"I need a coffee," he said. "Something hot."

"I need a drink," she said. "Something strong."

Like all lovers, they had soon assembled (as on a revolving stage) the places where the scenes of their drama alternately took place: a little Ukrainian diner whose windows were always occluded with steam, where the tea was black and so was the bread; the Folding Bedroom of course; a vast gloomy theater encrusted with Egyptian decoration, where the movies were cheap and changed often and played into the morning; the Nite Owl market; the Seventh Saint Bar & Grill.

The great virtue of the Seventh Saint, besides the price of its drinks and its nearness to Old Law Farm, a train stop away, was its wide front windows, nearly floor to ceiling, in which as in a shadow-box or on a movie screen the life of the street outside passed. The Seventh Saint must once have been somewhat splendid, for this glass wall was tinted a rich, expensive brown, which added a further unreality to the scene, and which darkened the interior like dark glasses. It was like being in Plato's cave, Auheron told Sylvie, who listened to him lecture on the subject; or rather watched him talk, fascinated by his strangeness and not paying inordinately close attention to the words. She loved to learn, but her mind wandered.

"The spoons?" he said, lifting one up.

"Girls," she said.

"And the knives and forks are boys," he said, glimpsing a pattern.

"No, the forks are girls too."

They had café-royale before them. Outside, hatted and scarved in the deathly cold, people hurried home from jobs, bent before the unseen wind as before an idol or a lofty personage. Sylvie was herself between jobs at the moment (a common dilemma for one with a Destiny as high as hers) and Auberon was living on his advances. They were poor but leisured.

"The table?" he asked. He couldn't imagine.

"A girl."

It was no wonder, he thought, that she was so sexy, when all the world was boys and girls to her. In the language she had been born into there were no neuters. In the Latin Auberon had learned, or at least studied, with Smoky, the genders of nouns were an abstraction that he at any rate could never feel; but to Sylvie the world was a constant congress of male and female, boy and girl. The world: that was el mundo, a man; but la terra, the earth, was a woman. That seemed right to Auberon; the world of affairs and notions, the name of a newspaper, the Great World; but mother earth, the fructifying soil, Dame Kind. Such appropriated divisions didn't extend very far, though: the lank-haired mop was a girl, but so was his bony typewriter.

They played that game for a while, and then commented on the people passing by. Because of the tint of the glass, those passing by outside saw, not the cave's interior, but themselves reflected; and, not knowing they were observed from inside, sometimes stopped to adjust their clothing, or admire themselves. Sylvie's strictures on the common run of people were harsher than his; she had a great taste for all eccentricities and oddities, but stern standards of physical beauty and a finely-honed sense of the ridiculous. "Oh, papo, check this one out, check him out. . . . That's what I meant by a soft-boiled egg, you see what I mean?" And he did see, and she dissolved in her sweet raucous laughter. Without ever knowing he did so, he adopted for life her standards of beauty, could even feel himself drawn to the lean, brown, soft-eyed, strong-wristed men she favored, like Leon the café-crème-colored waiter who had brought their drinks. It was a relief to him when she decided (after long thought) that their children would be beautiful.

The Seventh Saint was preparing for the dinner hour. The bus-boys glanced at their messy table. "You ready?" Auberon said.

"I'm ready," she said. "Let's blow this joint." A phrase of George's, full of aged double-entendres more reminiscent of wit than exactly funny. They bundled themselves up.

"Train or walk?" he asked. "Train."

"Hell yes," she said.


Whispering Gallery

In their rush to the warmth they leapt by mistake onto the express, which (full of sheeplike, sheep-smelling riders bound for the Bronx) didn't stop before it reached the old Terminus, mixing it up there with twenty other trains bound in all directions.

"Oh hey wait a sec," she said as they were changing trains. "There's something here I want to show you. Oh yeah! You gotta see this. Come on!"

They went down along passages and up ramps, the same complex Fred Savage had first threaded him through, though whether in the same direction he had no idea. "What," he said.

"You'll love it," she said. She paused at a turning. "Now if I can only find it . . . There!"

What she pointed to was an empty space: a vaulted intersection where four corridors met in a cross.

"What," he said.

"C'mere." She took him by the shoulders and steered him into a corner of the place, where the ribbed vaulting descended to the floor, making what seemed to be a slot or narrow opening but which was only joined bricks. She faced him into this joint. "Just stand there," she said, and she went away. He waited, obediently facing into the corner.

Then, startling him profoundly, her voice, distinct yet hollow and ghostly, sounded from directly in front of him: "Hi there."

"What," he said, "where . . ."

"Sh," her voice said. "Don't turn around. Talk real soft: whisper."

"What is it?" he whispered.

"I don't know," she said. "But if I stand over here in this corner, and whisper, you can hear me over there. Don't ask me how."

Weird! It sounded as though Sylvie were speaking to him from some realm within the corner, through a crack in an impossibly narrow door. A whispering gallery: hadn't there been some speculation about whispering galleries in the Architecture? Probably. There wasn't much that book didn't speculate about.

"Now," she said. "Tell me a secret."

He paused a moment. There was a privacy about the corner, the disembodied whispering, that tempted confidences. He felt bared, or barable, though he could see nothing: the opposite of a voyeur. He said: "I love you."

"Aw," she said, touched. "But that's not a secret."

A new fierce heat flew up his spine and erected his hair as a notion came to him. "Okay," he said, and told her of a secret desire he'd had but hadn't dared express to her before.

"Oh, hey, wow," she said. "You devil."

He said it again, adding a few details. It was just as though he were whispering the words into her ear in the darkest privacy of bed, but more abstract, more perfectly intimate even than that: right into her mind's ear. Someone walked past between them; Auberon could hear the footsteps. But the someone couldn't hear his words: he felt a shiver of glee. He said more.

"Mm," she said, as at the prospect of great comfort or satisfaction, a small sound that he couldn't help answering with a sound of his own. "Hey, what are you doing over there," her whisper said, insinuatingly. "Bad boy."

"Sylvie," he whispered. "Let's go home."

"Yah."

They turned away from their corners (each appearing to the other very small and bright and far away after the dark intimacy of their whispers) and came to meet in the center, laughing now, pressing into each other as much as their heavy coats allowed them to, and with many smiles and looks (God, he thought, her eyes are so bright, flashing, deep, full of promise, all those things eyes are in books but never are in life, and she was his) they caught the right train and rode home amid self-absorbed strangers who didn't notice the two of them, or if they noticed (Auberon thought) knew nothing, nothing of what he knew.


Right Side Up

Sex, he had found out, was really terrific. A terrific thing. Anyway the way Sylvie managed it. In him there had always been a split between the deep desires enchained within him and the cool circumspection which seemed to him required in the adult world he had come to inhabit (he felt, sometimes, by mistake). Strong desire seemed to him childish; childhood (his own, anyway, as far back as he could remember almost, and he could tell stories of others') was darkly aflame, burdened with heavy passions; adults had passed beyond all that, into affections, into the calmer enjoyments of companionability, into a childlike innocence. Weirdly backward he knew this to be, but it's how he had felt it. That adult desire, its exigency, its greatness, had been kept a secret from him like all the rest, he didn't wonder at; he didn't even bother to feel cheated or enraged at the long deception, since with Sylvie he had learned otherwise, broken the code, turned the thing inside-out so that it was right-side-up, and caught fire.

He hadn't come to her exactly a virgin, but he may as well have; with no one else had he shared this huge, this necessitous child's greed, no one had ever lavished hers on him or eaten him up so complacently and with such simple relish. There was no end to it and it was all gratified; if he wanted more (and he discovered in himself astonishing, long-compacted thicknesses of desire to be unfolded) he had more. And what he wanted he was as greedy to give and she as greedy to take. It was all so simple! Not that there were no rules, oh yes there were, they were like the rules of children's spontaneous games, strictly adhered to but often made up on the spot out of a sudden desire to change the game and please yourself. He remembered Cherry Lake, a dark-browed imperious little girl he had used to play with: she, unlike all the others he played with who said "Let's pretend," always used another formula—she said "We must." We must be bad guys. I must be captured and tied to this tree, and you must rescue me. I must be queen now, and you must be my servant. Must! yes . . .

Sylvie, it seemed, had always known, had never been in the dark about it all. She told him of certain shames and inhibitions she'd had as a kid where he'd had none, because all that stuff, she knew—kissing, taking off clothes with boys, the rush of feeling—was really for grown-ups, and she would come to it truly only when she was older, and had breasts and high heels and make-up. So there was not in her the division he felt; while he had been told that Mom and Dad had loved each other so much that they had subjected themselves to these childish indignities (so it seemed to him) in order to make babies, and could not connect these reported (and only halfbelieved-in) acts to the huge lashings of feeling invoked in him by Cherry Lake, by certain photographs, by mad games played naked, Sylvie had all along known the real story. Whatever other terrible problems life put before her, and they were many, that one at least she had solved; or rather she had never felt it to be posed. Romance was real, as real as flesh; love and sex were not even woof and warp in it, they were one indissoluble thing, like the seamless fabric of her scented brown skin.

It was he only, then—though in stark numbers she was not more experienced than he—who was astonished, amazed, that this indulgence like a greedy infant's turned out to be just what grown-ups do, turned out to be adulthood itself: the solemn bliss of strength and capability as well as the mad infant bliss of selfsatisfaction unending. It was manliness, womanliness, certified again and again by the most vivid of seals. Papi she called him in her bliss. Ày Papi yo vengo. Papi! Not daytime papo, but strong nighttime daddy, big as a platano and father of pleasures. He almost skipped to think of it, she pressed to his side, her head just reaching his shoulder; but he kept a steady, long-legged, grown-up pace. Was he right that men sensed his potency as he strode along with her, and deferred to him, was it true that women glanced at him covertly, admiringly? Why didn't everyone they passed, why didn't the very bricks and blank white sky bless them?

And so they did: at that moment, as they turned onto the street where Old Law Farm could be entered, between one footfall and another something anyway occurred, something that he thought at first to be within himself, a seizure or a heart attack, but instantly felt all around them: something enormous that was like a sound but wasn't one, was either a demolition (a whole block of dirty brick and wailpapered interiors gone to powder if it was) or a burst of thunder (breaking the sky at least in two, the sky which remained inexplicably blank winter white above, if it was) or both at once.

They stopped, clutching each other.

"What the hell was that?" Sylvie said.

"I don't know," he said. They waited a moment, but no roiling smokes arose from the buildings around them, no sirens wailed, ignited by catastrophe; and still the shoppers and loungers and criminals went their ways, unalarmed, unmoved, their faces filled with private wrongs.

They went on warily to Old Law Farm, holding each other, each feeling that the sudden blow had been meant to separate them (why? how?) and had only barely failed, and might come again at any moment.


What a Tangle

"Tomorrow," Tacey said, turning her embroidery-frame, "or the next day or the next."

"Oh," Lily said. She and Lucy were bent over a crazy-quilt, enriching its surface with different stitcheries, flowers, crosses, bows, esses. "Saturday or Sunday," Lucy said.

At that moment match was put to touch-hole (perhaps by accident, there would be some trouble about it afterwards) and the thing that Sylvie and Auberon in the City heard or felt rolled over Edgewood, booming the windows, rattling knickknacks on etagères, cracking a china figurine in Violet's old bedroom and making the sisters duck and raise their shoulders to protect themselves.

"What on earth," Tacey said. They looked at one another.

"Thunder," Lily said; "midwinter thunder, or maybe not."

"A jet plane," Tacey said, "breaking the sound barrier. Or maybe not."

"Dynamite," Lucy said. "Over at the Interstate. Or maybe not."

They bent to their work again, silent for a while.

"I wonder," Tacey said, looking up from her frame half turned back-to-front. "Well," she said, and chose a different thread.

"Don't," said Lucy. "That looks funny," she said critically, of a stitch Lily was making.

"This is a crazy-quilt," Lily said. Lucy watched her, and scratched her head, not convinced. "Crazy isn't funny," she said.

"Crazy and funny." She worked. "It's a big zigzag."

"Cherry Lake," Tacey said. She held her needle to the wan light of the window, which had ceased to tremble. "Thought she had two boys in love with her. The other day . . ."

"Was it some Wolf?" Lily asked.

"The other day," Tacey went on (slipping at the first try a silk thread green as jealousy through the needle's eye), "the Wolf boy had a terrible fight—with . . ."

"The rival."

"A third one; Cherry didn't even know. In the woods. She is . . ."

"Three," Lucy sang, and on the second "three" Lily joined her an octave lower: "Three, three, the rivals; two, two, the lilywhite boys, Clothed all in green-o."

"She is," Tacey said, "a cousin of ours, sort of."

"One is one," her sisters sang.

"She'll lose them all," Tacey said.

". . . And all alone, and ever more shall be so."

"You should use scissors," Tacey said, seeing Lucy face down on the quilt to bite a thread.

"You should mind your own . . ."

"Business," Lily said.

"Beeswax," Lucy said.

They sang again: Four for the gospel-makers.

"Run off," Tacey said. "All three."

"Never to return."

"Not soon anyway. As good as never."

"Auberon . . ."

"Great-grandfather August."

"Lilac."

"Lilac."

The needles they drew through cloth glittered when they pulled them out to the full extension of the thread; each time they pulled them through the threads grew shorter until they were all worked into the fabric, and must be cut, and others slipped through the needles' eyes. Their voices were so low that a listener would not have known who said what, or whether they talked at all or only murmured meaninglessly.

"What will be fun," Lily said, "is to see them all again."

"All come home again."

"Clothed all in green-o."

"Will we be there? Will all of us be? Where will it be, how long from now, what part of the wood, what season of the year?"

"We will."

"Nearly all."

"There, soon, not a lifetime, every part, midsummer."

"What a tangle," Tacey said, and held up for them to see a handful of stuff from her workbox, which a child or a cat had got into: silk thread bright as blood, and black cotton darning-stuff, a hank of sheep-colored wool, a silkpin or two, and a bit of sequined fabric dangling from it all, spinning on a thread-end like a descending spider.