Little, Big

Book Five - THE ART OF MEMORY

I.

The fields, the caves, the dens of

Memory cannot be counted; their

fullness cannot be counted nor the

kinds of things counted that fill

them . . . I force my way in amongst

them, even as far as my power

reaches, and nowhere find an end.

—Augustine, Confessio

Upon a deep midnight, the Maid of Stone knocked with a heavy fist on the tiny door of the Cosmo-Opticon on the top floor of Ariel Hawksquill's townhouse.

"The Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club to see you."

"Yes. Have them wait in the parlor."

The moon behind the mirrored moon of the Cosmo-Opticon, and the dull glow of the City lights, were all that illuminated the heavens of glass; the blackish Zodiac and the constellations could not be read. Odd, she thought, how (reversing the natural order) the Cosmo-Opticon was intelligible, ablaze, in the day, and obscure at night, when the real heaven's panoply is full. . . . She rose and came out, the iron Earth with its enameled rivers and mountains clanging beneath her feet.


The Hero Awakened

A year had passed since she had looked up to see that the Zodiac painted on the night-blue ceiling of the Terminus had changed its old wrong order of march and went the way the world went. In that year, her investigations into the nature and origins of Russell Eigenblick had grown only more intense, though the Club had fallen oddly silent; no longer lately did they send her cryptic telegrams urging her on, and though Fred Savage showed up as usual at her door with the installments of her fee, these weren't accompanied by the usual encouragements or reproaches. Had they lost interest?

If they had, she thought she could awaken it this night.

She had broken the case, in fact, some months before; the answer came, not from her occult researches, but from such mundane or sublunary places as her old encyclopaedia (tenth Britannica), the sixth volume of Gregorovius on Medieval Rome, and (a great folio in double columns, with a hasp to lock it up) the Prophecies of Abbot Joachim da Fiore. It was certainty that had taken all her arts, and that had to be bought at the cost of much labor, and much time. There was no doubt, now, though. She knew, that is, Who. She did not know How, or Why; she knew no more than she had known who the children of the children of Time were, whose champion Russell Eigenblick might be; she didn't know where those cards were which he was in, or in what sense he was in them. But she knew Who: and she had summoned the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club to hear that news.

They had disposed themselves around the chairs and sofa of her dimly-lit and crowded drawing-room or study on the ground floor.

"Gentlemen," she said, gripping the back of an upright leather chair like a lectern, "more than two years ago you gave me the assignment of discovering the nature and intentions of Russell Eigenblick. You have had an unconscionable wait, but I think tonight I can at least provide you with an identification; a recommendation as to the disposition of the case will be far harder. If I can make one at all. And if I can make one, then you—yes, even you—may be incapable of acting on it."

There was an exchange of glances at this, subtler than one sees on stage, but with the same effect of registering mutual surprise and concern. It had once before occurred to Hawksquill that the men she dealt with were not the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club at all, but actors hired to represent them. She suppressed the notion.

"We all know," she went on, "the tales, found in many mythologies, of a hero who, though slain on the field of battle or otherwise meeting a tragic end, is said not to have died at all, but to have been home away to somewhere, elsewhere, an isle or a cave or a cloud, where he sleeps; and from where, at his people's greatest need, he will issue, with his paladins, to aid them, and to rule then over a new Golden Age. Rex Quondam et Futurus. Arthur in Avalon; Sikander somewhere in Persia; Cuchulain in every other fen or glen of Ireland; Jesus Christ himself.

"All these tales, moving as they are, are not true. No trials of his people awakened Arthur; Cuchulain is able to sleep through the mutual slaughter of his, protracted over centuries; the Second Coming, continually announced, has been delayed past the virtual end of the Church that so much counted on it. No: whatever the next World-Age brings (and that age lies anyway well in the to-come) it will not bring back a hero whose name we know. But . . ." She paused, assailed by a sudden doubt. Said aloud, the absurdity of it seemed greater. She even flushed, ashamed, as she went on: "But it happens that one of these stories is true. It's not one we would ever have thought to be true, even if it were one we remember and tell, and for the most part it isn't; it and its hero are much forgotten. But we know it to be true because the necessary conclusion of it has occurred: the hero has awakened. Russell Eigenblick is he."

This shot fell less heavily among her hearers than she had expected it to. She felt them withdraw from her; she saw, or perceived, their necks stiffen, their chins draw down doubtfully into expensive haberdashery. There was nothing for it but to go on.

"You may wonder," she said, "as I did, what people Russell Eigenblick has returned to aid, We as a people are too young to have cultivated stories like those told of Arthur, and perhaps too self-satisfied to have felt the need of any. Certainly none are told of the so-called fathers of our country; the idea that one of those gentlemen is not dead but asleep, say, in the Ozarks or the Rockies is funny but not anywhere held. Only the despised ghost-dancing Red Man has a history and a memory long enough to supply such a hero; and the Indians have shown as little interest in Russell Eigenblick as in our Presidents, and he as little in them. What people then?

"The answer is: no people. No people: but an Empire. An Empire which could, and once did, comprise any people or peoples regardless, and had a life, a crown, borders and capitals of the greatest mutability. You will remember Voltaire's dig: that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Yet in some sense it existed until (as we have thought) its last Emperor, Francis II, resigned the title in 1806. Well: my contention is, gentlemen, that the Holy Roman Empire did not pass away then either. It continued to exist. It continued, like an amoeba, to shift, crawl, expand, contract; and that while Russell Eigenblick slept his long sleep (exactly eight hundred years by my reckoning)—while, in effect, we all slept—it has crept and slid, shifting and drifting like the continents, until it is now located here, where we sit. How exactly its borders should be drawn I have no idea, though I suspect they may be identical with this country's. In any case we are well within it. This city may even be its Capital: though probably only its Chief City."

She had ceased looking at them.

"And Russell Eigenblick?" she asked of no one. "He was once its Emperor. Not its first, who was of course Charlemagne (about whom the same sleep-wake story was for a while told) nor its last, nor even its greatest. Vigorous, yes; talented; uneven in temperament; no administrator; steady, but generally unsuccessful, in war. It was he who, by the way, added the 'holy' to his Empire's name. About 1190 he chose, with the Empire generally at peace and the Pope for the moment off his back, to go on crusade. The Infidel only briefly felt his scourge; he won a battle or two, and then, crossing a stream in Armenia, he fell from his horse, and was too weighted down by his armor to get out. He drowned. So says Gregorovius, among other authorities.

"The Germans, though, after many later reverses, came to disbelieve this. He hadn't died. He was only asleep, perhaps beneath the Kyffhauser in the Hartz Mountains (the place is still pointed out to tourists) or perhaps in Domdaniel in the sea, or wherever, but he would return, one day; return to the aid of his beloved Germans, and lead German arms to victory and a German empire to glory. The hideous history of Germany in the last century may be the working-out of this vain dream. But in fact that Emperor, despite his birth and his name, was no German. He was Emperor of all the world, or at least all Christendom. He was heir to French Charlemagne and Roman Caesar. And now he has shifted like his ancient borders, and has changed no allegiances in doing so, only his name. Gentlemen, Russell Eigenblick is the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, yes, die alte Barbarossa, reawakened to rule over this strange latter age of his Empire."

This last sentence she had spoken, her voice rising, against a growing swell of murmurs, protests, and standings-up among her hearers.

"Absurd!" said one.

"Preposterous!" said another, like a spit.

"Do you mean to say, Hawksquill," said a third, more reasonably, "that Russell Eigenblick supposes himself to be this resurrected Emperor, and that . . ."

"I have no idea who he supposes himself to be," Hawksquill said. "I'm only telling you who he in fact is."

"Then answer me this," said the member, raising his hand to silence the hubbub Hawksquill's insistence raised. "Why is it just now that he returns? I mean didn't you say that these heroes return at the time of their people's greatest need, and so on?"

"Traditionally they are said to, yes."

"Then why now? If this futile Empire has lain doggo for so long . . ."

Hawksquill looked down. "I said it would be hard for me to make a recommendation. I'm afraid that there are essential pieces of this puzzle still withheld from me."

"Such as."

"For one," she said, "the cards he speaks of. I can't now go into my reasons, but I must see them, and manipulate them. . . ." There was an impatient uncrossing and recrossing of legs. Someone asked why. "I supposed," she said, "you would need to know his strength. His chances. What times he considers propitious. The point is, gentlemen, that if you intend to suppress him, you had better know whether Time is on your side, or on his; and whether you are not futilely ranging yourselves against the inevitable."

"And you can't tell us."

"I'm afraid I can't. Yet."

"It doesn't matter," said the senior member present, rising. "I'm afraid, Hawksquill, that, your investigations in this case being so prolonged, we've had to come to a decision ourselves. We came tonight chiefly to discharge you of any further obligation."

"Hm," said Hawksquill.

The senior member chuckled indulgently. "And it doesn't really seem to me," he said, "that your present revelations do much to alter the case. As I remember my history, the Holy Roman Empire had not a lot to do with the life of the peoples who supposedly comprised it. Am I right? The real rulers liked having the Imperial power in their hands or under their control, but in any case did what they liked."

"That was often so."

"Well then. The course we decided on was the right one. If Russell Eigenblick turns out to be in some sense this Emperor, or convinces enough people of it (I notice, by the way, he continually puts off announcing just who he is, big mystery), then he might be more useful than the reverse."

"May I ask," Hawksquill said, motioning forward the Maid of Stone who stood mumchance in the doorway with a tray of glasses and a tall decanter, "what course of action you decided on?"

The Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club settled back in their seats, smiling. "Co-optation," said a member—one of those who had most vigorously protested Hawksquill's conclusions. "The power of certain charlatans," he went on, "isn't to be despised. We learned that in last summer's marches and riots. The Church of All Streets fracas. Et cetera. Of course such power is usually short-lived. It's not real power. All wind, really: A storm soon passed. They know it, too. . . ."

"But," said another member, "when such a one is introduced to real power—promised a share in it—his opinions indulged—his vanity flattered . . ."

"Then he can be enlisted. He can be used, frankly."

"You see," said the senior member, waving away the drink-tray offered him, "in the large scheme, Russell Eigenblick has no real powers, no strong adherents. A few clowns in colored shirts, a few devoted men. His oratory moves; but who remembers next day? If he stirred up great hatreds, or mobilized old bitternesses—but he doesn't. It's all vagueness. So: we'll offer him real allies. He has none. He'll accept. There are lures we have. He'll be ours. And damn useful he might prove, too."

"Hm," Hawksquill said again. Schooled as she had been in the purest of studies, on the highest of planes, she had never found deception and evasion easy. That Russell Eigenblick had no allies was, anyway, true. That he was a cat's-paw for forces more powerful, less namable, more insidious than the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club could imagine, she ought by rights to inform them: though she herself could not yet name those forces. But she had been released from the case. They wouldn't anyway—she could see it in their smug faces—probably listen to her. Still she blushed, fiercely, at what she withheld from them, and said, "I think I'll have a drop of this. Will no one join me?"

"The fee," said a member, watching her closely as she poured for him, "need not be returned, of course."

She nodded at him. "When exactly do you put your plan into execution?"

"This day next week," said the senior member, "we have a meeting with him in his hotel." He rose, looking around him, ready to go. Those members who had accepted drinks swallowed them hastily. "I'm sorry," the senior member said, "that after all your labors we've gone our own way."

"It's no doubt just as well," Hawksquill said, not rising.

They looked at each other—all standing now—in that unconvincing manner, this time expressing thoughtful doubt or doubtful thought, and took a muted leave of her. One hoped aloud as they went out that she had not been offended; and the others, as they inserted themselves into their cars, pondered that possibility, and what it might mean for them.

Hawksquill, alone, pondered it too.

Released from her obligation to the Club, she was a free agent. If a new old Empire were rearising in the world, she couldn't but think it would give her new and wider scope for her powers. Hawksquill was not immune to the lure of power; great wizards rarely are.

And yet no New Age was at hand. Whatever powers stood behind Russell Eigenblick might not, in the end, be as strong as the powers the Club could bring against them.

Whose side then, supposing she could determine which side was which, would she be on?

She watched the legs her brandy made on the sides of the glass. A week from today . . . She rang for the Maid of Stone, ordered coffee, and readied herself for a long night's work: they were too few now to spend one asleep.


A Secret Sorrow

Exhausted by fruitless labor, she came down some time after dawn and went out into the bird-loud street.

Opposite her tall and narrow house was a small park which had once been public but which was now sternly locked; only the residents of those houses and private clubs which faced on it, viewing it with calm possessiveness, had keys to the wrought-iron gates. Hawksquill had one. The park, too chock-full of statues, fountains, birdbaths and such fancies, rarely refreshed her, since she had more than once used it as a sort of notepad, sketching quickly on its sunwise perimeter a Chinese dynasty or a Hermetic mathesis, none of which (of course) she was now able to forget.

But now in the misty dawn on the first day of May it was obscure, vague, not rigorous. It was air mostly, almost not a City air, sweet and rich with the exhalation of newborn leaves; and obscurity and vagueness were just what she required now.

As she came up to the gate she used, she saw that someone was standing before it, gripping the bars and staring within hopelessly, obverse of a jailed man. She hesitated. Walkers-abroad at this hour were of two kinds: humdrum hard workers up early, and the unpredictable and the lost who had been up all night. Those seemed to be pajama bottoms protruding from beneath this one's long overcoat, but Hawksquill didn't take this to mean that he was an early riser. She chose a grand-lady manner as best suited to the encounter and, taking out her key, asked the man to excuse her, she'd like to open the gate.

"About time too," he said.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," she said; he had stood aside only slightly, expectantly, and she saw that he intended to follow her in. "It's a private park. I'm afraid you can't come in. It's only for those who live around it, you see. Who have the key."

She could see his face now clearly, with its desperate growth of whisker and its wrinkles etched deeply with filth; yet he was young. Above his fierce yet vacant eyes a single eyebrow ran.

"It's damned unfair," he said. "They've all got houses, what the hell do they need a park for too?" He stared at her, rageful and frustrated. She wondered if she should explain to him that there was no more injustice in his being locked out of this park than out of the buildings that surrounded it. The way he looked at her seemed to require some plea; or then on the other hand perhaps the injustice he complained of was the universal and unanswerable kind, the kind Fred Savage liked to point up, needing no spurious or ad-hoc explanations. "Well," she said, as she often did to Fred.

"When your own great-grandfather built the damn thing." His eyes looked upward, calculating. "Great-great-grandfather." He pulled, with sudden purpose, a glove from his pocket, put it on (his medicus extending naked from an unseamed finger) and began brushing away the new-leaving ivy and obscuring dirt from a plaque screwed to the rusticated red-stone gate-post. "See? Damn it." The plaque said—it took her a moment to work it out, surprised she had never noticed it, the whole history of Beaux-Arts public works could have been laid on its close-packed Roman face and the floweret nailheads that held it in place—the plaque said "Mouse Drinkwater Stone 1900."

He wasn't a nut. City-dwellers in general and Hawksquill in particular have a sure sense, in these encounters, of the distinction—fine but real—between the impossible imaginings of the mad and the equally impossible but quite true stories of the merely lost and damned, "Which," she said, "are you, the Mouse, the Drinkwater, or the Stone?"

"I guess you wouldn't know," he said, "how impossible it is to get a little peace and quiet in this town. Do I look like a bum to you?"

"Well," she said.

"The fact is you can't sit down on a God damn park bench or a doorway without ten drunks and loudmouths collecting as though they were blown together. Telling you their life stories. Passing around a bottle. Chums. Did you know how many bums are queer? A lot. It's surprising." He said it was surprising but in fact he seemed to feel it was just what was to be expected and no less infuriating for that. "Peace and quiet," he said again, in a tone so genuinely full of longing, so full of the dewy tulip-beds and shadowed walks within the little park, that she said: "Well, I suppose an exception can be made. For a descendant of the builder." She turned her key in the lock and swung open the gate. For a moment he stood as before those final gates of pearl, wondering; then he went in.

Once inside his rage seemed to abate, and though she hadn't intended it, she walked with him along the curiously curving paths that seemed always about to lead them deeper within the park but in fact always contrived to direct them back to its perimeters. She knew the secret of these—which was, of course, to take those paths which seemed to be heading outward, and you would go in; and with subtle motions she directed their steps that way. The paths, though they didn't seem to, led them in to where a sort of pavilion or temple—a tool shed in fact, she supposed—stood at the park's center. Overarching trees and aged bushes disguised its miniature size; from certain angles it appeared to be the visible porch or corner of a great house; and though the park was small, here at the center the surrounding city, by some trick of planting and perspective, could hardly be perceived at all. She began to remark on this.

"Yes," he said. "The further in you go, the bigger it gets. Would you like a drink?" He pulled from his pocket a flat clear bottle.

"Early for me," she said. She watched, fascinated, as he undid the bottle and slid a good bit of it down a throat no doubt now so flayed and tanned it couldn't feel. She was surprised then to see him shaken by big involuntary shudders, and his face twisted in disgust just as hers would have been if she'd tried that gulp. Just a beginner, she thought. Just a child, really. She supposed he had a secret sorrow, and was pleased to contemplate it; it was just the change she needed from the hugeness she had been struggling with.

They sat together on a bench. The young man wiped the neck of his bottle on his sleeve and recapped it carefully. He slid it into the pocket of his brown overcoat without haste. Strange, she thought, that glass and clear cruel liquid could be so comforting, so tenderly regarded. "What the hell is that supposed to be?" he said.

They faced the square stone place that Hawksquill supposed to he a tool shed or other facility, disguised as a pavilion or miniature pleasure-dome. "I don't know exactly," she said, "but the reliefs on it represent the Four Seasons, I think. One to a side."

The one before them was Spring, a Greek maiden doing some potting, with an ancient tool very like a trowel and a tender shoot in her other hand. A baby lamb nestled near her and like her looked hopeful, expectant, new. It was all quite well done; by varying the depth of his cutting, the artist had given an impression of distant fields newly turned and returning birds. Daily life in the ancient world. It resembled no spring that had ever come to the City, but it was nonetheless Spring. Hawksquill had more than once employed it as such. She had for a time wondered why the little house had been placed off-center on its plot of ground, not square with the streets around the park; and after a little thought saw that it faced the compass points, Winter facing north and Summer to the south, Spring east, and Autumn west. It was easy to forget, in the City, that north was only very approximately uptown—though not easy for Hawksquill, and apparently this designer had thought a true orientation important too. She liked him for it. She even smiled at the young man next to her, a supposed descendant, though he looked like a City creature who didn't know solstice from equinox.

"What good is it?" he said, quietly but truculently.

"It's handy," said Hawksquill. "For remembering things."

"What?"

"Well," she said. "Suppose you wanted to remember a certain year, and the order in which events happened then. You could memorize these four panels, and use the things pictured in them as symbols for the events you want to remember. If you wanted to remember that a certain person was buried in the spring, well, there's the trowel."

"Trowel?"

"Well, that digging tool."

He looked at her askance. "Isn't that a little morbid?"

"It was an example."

He regarded the maiden suspiciously, as if she were in fact about to remind him of something, something unpleasant. "The little plant," he said at length, "could be something you began in the spring. A job. Some hope."

"That's the idea," she said.

"Then it withers."

"Or bears fruit."

He was thoughtful a long time; he drew out his bottle and repeated his ritual exactly, though with less grimace. "Why is it," he said then, his voice faint from the gin that had washed it, "that people want to remember everything? Life is here and now. The past is dead."

She said nothing to this.

"Memories, Systems. Everybody poring over old albums and decks of cards. If they're not remembering, they're predicting. What good is it?"

An old cowbell rang within Hawksquill's halls. "Cards?" she said.

"Brooding on the past," he said, regarding Spring. "Will that bring it back?"

"Only order it." She knew that, reasonable as they might seem, people like this who live on the street are differently composed from people who live in houses. They have a reason for being where they are, expressed in a peculiar apprehension of things, a loss of engagement with the ordinary world and how it goes on, often unwilled, She knew she must not press questions on him, pursue a subject, for like the paths in this place that would only lead her away. Yet she wanted very much now not to lose contact. "Memory can be an art," she said schoolmarmishly. "Like architecture. I think your ancestor would have understood that."

He lifted eyebrows and shoulders as though to say Who knows, or cares.

"Architecture, in fact," she said, "is frozen memory. A great man said that."

"Hm."

"Many great thinkers of the past"—how she had caught this teachery tone she didn't know, but she couldn't seem to relinquish it, and it seemed to hold her hearer—"believed that the mind is a house, where memories are stored; and that the easiest way to remember things is to imagine an architecture, and then cast symbols of what you wish to remember on the various places defined by the architect." Well, that surely must have lost him, she thought, but after some thought he said:

"Like the guy buried with the trowel."

"Exactly."

"Dumb," he said.

"I can give you a better example."

"Hm."

She gave him Quintillian's highly-colored example of a law-case, freely substituting modern for ancient symbols, and spreading them around the parts of the little park. His head swiveled from side to side as she placed this and that here and there, though she had no need to look. "In the third place," she said, "we put a broken toy car, to remind us of the driver's license that expired. In the fourth place—that arch sort of thing behind you to the left—we hang a man, say a Negro all dressed in white, with pointed shoes hanging down, and a sign on him: INRI."

"What on earth."

"Vivid. Concrete. The judge has said: unless you have documentary proof, you will lose the case. The Negro in white means having it on paper."

"In black and white."

"Yes. The fact that he's hanged means we have captured this black-and-white proof, and the sign, that it is this that will save us."

"Good God."

"It sounds terribly complicated, I know. And I suppose it's really not any better than a notebook."

"Then why all that guff? I don't get it."

"Because," she said carefully, sensing that despite his outward truculence he understood her, "it can happen—if you practice this art—that the symbols you put next to one another will modify themselves without your choosing it, and that when next you call them forth, they may say something new and revelatory to you, something you didn't know you knew. Out of the proper arrangement of what you do know, what you don't know may arise spontaneously. That's the advantage of a system. Memory is fluid and vague. Systems are precise and articulated. Reason apprehends them better. No doubt that's the case with those cards you spoke of."

"Cards?"

Too soon? "You spoke of brooding over a deck of cards."

"My aunt. Not my aunt really," as though disclaiming her. "My grandfather's aunt. She had these cards. Lay them out, think about them. Brood on the past. Predict things."

"Tarot?"

"Hm?"

"Were they the Tarot deck? You know, the hanged man, the female pope, the tower . . ."

"I don't know.. How would I know? Nobody ever explained anything to me." He brooded. "I don't remember those pictures, though."

"Where did they come from?"

"I dunno. England, I guess. Since they were Violet's."

She started, but he was lost in thought and didn't see. "And there were some cards with pictures? Besides the court cards?"

"Oh yeah. A whole slew of 'em. People, places, things, notions."

She leaned back, interlacing her fingers slowly. It had happened before that a place which she had put to multiple memory uses, like this park, came to be haunted by figments, hortatory or merely weird, called into being simply by the overlap of old juxtapositions, speaking, sometimes, of a meaning she would not otherwise have seen. If it were not for the sour smell of this one's overcoat, the undeniable this-worldness of the striped pajamas beneath it, she might have thought him to be one of them. It didn't matter. There is no chance. "Tell me," she said. "These cards."

"What if you wanted to forget a certain year?" he said. "Not remember it, but forget it. No help there, is there? No system for that, oh no."

"Oh, I suppose there are methods," she said, thinking of his bottle.

He seemed sunk in bitter reflection, eyes vacant, long neck bent like a sad bird's, hands folded in his lap. She was casting about for words to form a new question about the cards when he said: "The last time she read those cards for me, she said I'd meet a dark and beautiful girl, of all cornball things."

"Did you?"

"She said I'd win this girl's love through no virtue I had, and lose her through no fault of my own."

He said nothing else for a time, and (though not sure now that he heard or registered much of anything she said to him) she ventured softly: "That's often the way, with love." Then, when he didn't respond: "I have a certain question that a certain deck of cards might answer. Does your aunt still . . ."


"She's dead."

"Oh."

"My aunt, though. I mean she wasn't my aunt, but my aunt. Sophie." He made a gesture which seemed to mean This is complex and boring, but surely you catch my drift.

"The cards are still in your family," she guessed.

"Oh, yeah. Never throw out anything."

"Where exactly . . ."

He raised a hand to stop her question, suddenly wary. "I don't want to go into family matters."

She waited a moment and then said: "It was you who mentioned your great-great-grandfather, who built this park." Why suddenly was she visted with a vision of Sleeping Beauty's castle? A chateau. With a hedge of thorn, impassable.

"John Drinkwater," he said, nodding.

Drinkwater. The architect . . . A mental snap of fingers. That hedge wasn't thorn. "Was he married to a woman named Violet Bramble?"

He nodded.

"A mystic, a seer of sorts?"

"Who the hell knows what she was."

Urgency suddenly compelled her to a gesture, rash perhaps, but there was no time to waste. She took from her pocket the key to the park and held it up before him by its chain, as old mesmerists used to do before their subjects. "It seems to me," she said, seeing him take notice, "that you deserve free access here. This is my key." He held out a hand, and she drew the key somewhat away. "What I require in exchange is an introduction to the woman who is or is not your aunt, and explicit directions as to how to find her. All right?"

As though in fact mesmerized, staring fixedly at the glinting bit of brass, he told her what she wanted to know. She placed the key in his filthy glove. "A deal," she said.

Auberon clutched the key, his only possession now, though Hawksquill couldn't know that, and, the spell broken, looked away, not sure he hadn't betrayed something, but unwilling to feel guilt.

Hawksquill rose. "It's been most illuminating," she said. "Enjoy the park. As I said, it can be handy."



A Year to Place Upon It

Auberon, after another scalding yet kindly draught, began, closing one eye, to measure out his new demesne. The regularity of it surprised him, since its tone was not regular but bosky and artless. Yet the benches, gates, obelisks, marten-houses on poles, and the intersections of paths had a symmetry easily adduced from where he sat. It all depended from or radiated outward from the little house of the seasons.

That was all hopeless guff she had instructed him in, of course. He did feel bad about inflicting such a lunatic on his family, not that they would notice probably, hopeless themselves; and the price had not been resistable. Odd how a man of wide sympathies like himself started such hares and harebrains wherever he went.

Outside the park, framed in sycamores from where he sat, was a small classical courthouse (Drinkwater's too for all he knew), surmounted with statues of lawgivers at even intervals. Moses. Solon. Etc. A place to put a law-case, certainly. His own infuriating struggle with Petty, Smilodon & Ruth. Those coffered brass doors not yet open for business the locked entrance to his inheritance, the egg-and-dart molding the endless repetition of delay and hope, hope and delay.

Stupid. He looked away. What was the point? No matter how gracefully the building accepted his case in all its complexity (and as he glanced again sidelong at it he saw that it could and did) it was needless. How could he forget all that? The doles they eked out to him, enough to keep him from starvation, enough to keep him signing (with an increasingly furious scrawl) the instruments, waivers, pleas and powers they presented him with as those stony-eyed immortals there proffered tablets, books, codices: the last of the last had bought this gin he now drank of, and more than was left in the bottle would be necessary for him to forget the indignity of his pleading for it, the injustice of it all. Diocletian counted out wrinkled bills from petty cash.

Hell with that. He left the courthouse outside. In here there was no law.

A year to place upon it. She had said that the value of her system was how it would cast up, spontaneously, what you didn't know out of the proper arrangement of what you did.

Well: there was a thing he didn't know.

If he could believe what the old woman had said, if he could, wouldn't he then set to work here, commit every tulip-bed and arrowheaded fence-post, every whitewashed stone, every budding leaf to memory, so that he could distribute among them every tiny detail of lost Sylvie? Wouldn't he then march furiously sniffing up and down the curving paths, like this mutt that had just entered with his master, searching, searching, going sunwise then antisunwise, searching until the one single simple answer arose, the astonishing lost truth, that would make him clutch his brow and cry I see?

No, he would not.

He had lost her; she was gone, and for good. That fact was all that excused and made reasonable, even proper, his present degradation. If her whereabouts were revealed to him now, though he had spent a year trying to learn them, he would avoid them of all places.

And yet. He didn't want to find her, not any more; but he would like to know why. Would like to know (timidly, subjunctively) why she had left him never to return, without a word, without, apparently, a backward glance. Would like to know, well, what was up with her nowadays, if she was all right, whether she thought of him ever, and in what mode, kindly or otherwise. He recrossed his legs, tapping one broken shoe in the air. No: it was just as well, really; just as well that he knew the old woman's batty and monstrous system to be useless. That Spring could never be the spring she had blossomed for him, nor that shoot their love, nor that trowel the tool by which his rageful and unhappy heart had been scored with joy.


In the First Place

He hadn't at first found her disappearance all that alarming. She'd run off before, for a few nights or a weekend, where and for what reasons he never pressed her about, he was cool, he was a hands-off guy. She hadn't ever before taken every stitch of clothes and every souvenir, but he didn't put it beyond her, she could bring them all back in an hour, at any hour, having missed a fleeing bus or train or plane or been unable to bear whatever relative or friend or lover she had camped with. A mistake. The greatness of her desires, of her longing for life to come out right even in the impossible conditions under which hers was lived, led her into such mistakes. He rehearsed fatherly or avuncular speeches with which, unhurt and unalarmed and not angry, he would counsel her after he welcomed her back.

He looked for notes. The Folding Bedroom though small was such a chaos that he might easily have overlooked one; it had slipped down behind the stove, she had propped it on the windowsill and it had blown out into the farmyard, he had closed it up in the bed. It would be a note in her huge, wild round hand; it would start "Hi!" and be signed with x's for kisses. It had been on the back of something inconsequential, which he had thrown out even as he searched through inconsequential papers for it. He emptied the wastebasket, but when its contents lay around his ankles he stopped the search and stood stock still, having suddenly imagined another sort of note entirely, a note with no "Hi!" and no kisses. It would resemble a love letter in its earnest, overwrought tone, but it wouldn't be a love letter.

There were people he could call. When (after endless trouble) they had had a phone put in, amazing George Mouse, she had used to spend a good amount of time talking to relatives and quasi-relatives in a rapid and (to him) hilarious mixture of Spanish and English, shouting with laughter sometimes and sometimes just shouting. He had taken down none of the numbers she called; she herself often lost the scraps of paper and old envelopes she had written them on, and had to recite them out loud, eyes cast upward, trying out different combinations of the same numbers till she hit on one that sounded right.

And the phone book, when (just hypothetically, there was no immediate need) he consulted it, listed surprising columns, whole armies in fact, of Rodriguezes and Garcias and Fuenteses, with great pompous Christian names, Monserrate, Alejandro, such as he had never heard her use. And talk about pompous names, look at this last guy, Archimedes Zzzyandottie, what on earth.

He went to bed absurdly early, trying to hurry through the hours till her inevitable return; he lay listening to the thump and hum and squeak and wail of night, trying to sort from it the first intimations of her footfalls on the stair, in the hail; his heart quickened, banishing sleep, as he heard inhis mind's ear the scratch of her red nails on the door. In the morning he woke with a start, unable to remember why she wasn't next to him; and then remembered that he didn't know.

Surely around the Farm someone would have heard something, but he would have to be circumspect; he restricted himself to inquiries that, if they ever got back to her, would reveal no possessive distress or fussy prying on his part. But the answers which he got from the farmers raking muck and setting out tomatoes were even less revealing than his questions.

"Seen Sylvie?"

"Sylvie?"

Like an echo. A kind of propriety kept him from approaching George Mouse, for it could be that it was to him she had fled, and he didn't want to hear that from George, not that he had ever felt competition from his cousin, or jealousy, but, well, he didn't like any of the possible conversations he could imagine himself and George having on the subject. A weird fear was growing in him. He saw George once or twice, trundling a wheelbarrow in and out of goat sheds, and studied him secretly. His state seemed unchanged.

At evening he fell into a rage, and imagined that, not content with leaving him flat, she had engineered a conspiracy of silence to cover her tracks. "Conspiracy of silence" and "cover her tracks," he said aloud, more than once that long night, to the furnishings of the Folding Bedroom which were none of them hers. (Hers were at that moment being exclaimed over, one by one, elsewhere, as they were taken from the drawstring bags of the three brown-capped flat-faced thieves who had abstracted them; exclaimed over in cooing small voices one by one before being put away in a humpbacked trunk bound in black iron, to wait for their owner to come and claim them.)


And in the Second Place

The bartender at the Seventh Saint, "their" bartender, didn't appear for work that night or the next or the next, though Auberon came every night to question him. The new guy wasn't sure just what had happened to him. Gone to the Coast, maybe. Gone, anyway. Auberon, having no better post from which to keep vigil when he could no longer bear the Folding Bedroom or Old Law Farm, ordered another. One of those periodic upheavals in bar life had taken place among the clientele lately. As evening drew on, he recognized few regulars; they seemed to have been swept away by a new crowd, a crowd that did superficially resemble the crowd Sylvie and he had known, were in fact the same people in every respect except that they were not. The only familiar face was Leon's. After an inward struggle and several gins, he managed a casual question.

"Seen Sylvie?"

"Sylvie?"

It might well be, of course, that Leon was hiding her in some apartment uptown. It might be that she had gone to the Coast with Victor the bartender. Sitting his stool before the broad brown window night after night, watching the crowds outside pass, he concocted these and several other explanations of what had happened to Sylvie, some pleasing to him, some distressing. He fitted each out with motives planted in the past, and a resolution; what she would do and say, and what he. These would grow stale, and like a failing baker he would remove them, still pretty but unsold, from his case, and replace them with others. He was at this on the Friday after her disappearance, the place packed with laughing folks more bent on pleasure, more exquisite than the diurnal crowd (though he couldn't be sure they weren't the same). He sat his stool as on a solitary rock amid their foamy rushing back and forth. The sweet scent of liquor mingled with their mingled perfumes, and all together they made the soughing sea-noise which, when he became a television writer, he would learn to call "walla". Walla walla walla. Far away, waiters tended to the banquettes, drawing corks and laying cutlery. An older man, white-templed less it seemed from age than by choice but with an air of subtle ruin about his nattiness, poured wine for a dark, laughing woman in a broad-brimmed hat.

The woman was Sylvie.

One explanation that had occurred to him for her disappearance was her disgust with her poverty; often she had said, as she pawed furiously through her thrift-shop clothes and dime-store valuables, makeshifting an outfit, that what she needed was a rich old man, that she'd turn tricks if she only had the nerve—I mean look at this clothes, man! He looked now at her clothes, nothing he had ever seen before, the hat shading her face was velvet, the dress nicely constructed—lamplight fell, as though guided there, into its decolletage and lit the amber roundness of her breast; he could see it from where he sat. A small roundness.

Should he leave? How could he? Turmoil nearly blinded him. They had ceased laughing together, and raised their glasses now, topped up with lurid wine, and their eyes met like voluptuaries greeting. Good God, what nerve to bring him here. The man took an oblong case from within his jacket, and opened it to her. It would contain icy jewels blue and white. No, it was a cigarette case. She took one and he lit it for her. Befcre he could be harrowed by the characteristic way she had of smoking her occasional cigarette, as individual as her laugh or her footstep, thronging crowds intervened. When they parted, he saw her take up her purse (also new) and rise. The john. He hid his head. She would have to pass by him where he sat. Flee? No: there was a way, he thought, to greet her, there must be, but only seconds in which to find it. Hi. Hello. Hello? Heh-lo, fancy meeting . . . His heart was mad. Having calculated the moment at which she must pass by, he turned, supposing his face to be composed and his heart-thuds invisible.

Where was she? He thought a woman just then passing near him in a black hat was she, but it wasn't. She had disappeared. Passed by him quickly? Hidden from him? She would have to pass him again on her return. He'd keep watch now. Maybe she'd leave, covered with shame, sneak away sticking Mr. Rich with the bill but no favors. The woman he had for a moment thought to be her—in fact years and inches different, with a practised lurch and a gravelvoiced excuse-me—worked her way past him, and through the massed exquisites, and took her seat with Mr. Rich.

How could he even for a moment have thought . . . His heart turned to an ember, to a cold clinker. The cheerful walla of the bar faded away into a sound of silence, and Auberon had a sudden horrible percipience, like a dropped ball of mental string madly unwinding, of what this vision meant, and what would now, must now, become of him; and he raised a trembling hand for the bartender, pushing bills urgently across the bar with the other.


And in the Third

He arose from his bench in the park. Traffic had grown loud as day grew bright, the City flinging itself against this enclave of morning. Without reservations now, but with a strange hope in his heart, he moved sunwise around the small pavilion and sat again, before Summer.

Bacchus and his pards; the flaccid wineskin and the checkered shade. The faun that follows, the nymph that flies. Yes: so it was, so it had been, so it would be. And below all this pictured lassitude was a sort of fountain, the sort where water gushes from a lion's or a dolphin's mouth: only this wasn't a lion or a dolphin but a man's face, a medallion of grief, a tragic mask with snaky hair; and the water was not issuing from his sad-clown mouth but from his eyes, falling in two slow and constant trickles down his cheeks and chin into a scummy pool below. It made a pleasant sound.

Hawksquill meanwhile had gone to her car in its underground den, and slipped into its waiting seat which was clad in leather as smooth as the backless gloves she then drew on. The wooden wheel carved for her grip and polished by her hands backed the long wolflike shape neatly around and faced it outward; with a clanking the garage door opened and the car's growl opened fanwise into the May air.

Violet Bramble. John Drinkwater. The names made a room: a room where pampas grass stood in heavy floor vases purple and brown, and there were Ricketts drawings on the lily-patterned walls, and the drapes were drawn for a seance. In the fruitwood bookcases were Gurdjieff and other frauds. How could anything like a world-age be born there, or one die? Moving uptown in knight's-moves as the clotted traffic forced her, her impatient tires casting up filth, she thought: yet it may well be; may well be that they have kept a secret for all these years, and a very great secret too; and it may be that she, Hawksquill, had come close to a very great mistake. It would not be the first time . . . . The traffic around her loosened as she set out on the wide north road; her car threaded through it like a needle through old cloth, picking up speed. The boy's directions had been eccentric and wandering, but she wouldn't forget them, having impressed each one in place on an old folding Monopoly board she kept in her memory for just such a use.