Little, Big

III.

Despising, for your sake, the City, thus

I turn my back: there is a world elsewhere.

—Coriolanus

Hawksquill's powerful Vulpes translated her back to the City in a near-record time, and yet (so her watch told her) perhaps still not under the wire. Though she was now in possession of all the missing parts of the problem of Russell Eigenblick, the learning of those parts had taken longer than she had expected.


Not a Moment Too Soon

All along the road north she had planned how she might present herself to the heirs of Violet Drinkwater in such a way—as antiquarian, collector, cultist—that the cards would be shown her. But if she had not herself been predicted in them (Sophie knew her at once, or recognized her very quickly) they would certainly not have been yielded up to her at all. That she proved to he as well a tenuous cousin of Violet Bramble's descendants had helped too, a coincidence that surprised and delighted that strange family as much as it interested Hawksquill. And even so days went by as she and Sophie pored over the cards. More days she spent with the last edition of The Architecture of Country Houses, whose peculiar contents none of them seemed to be very familiar with; and though, as she studied and pored, the whole story—or as much of it as had so far happened—gradually came clear under her cockatoo scrutiny, still all the while the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club advanced toward the fateful meeting with Russell Eigenblick, and still Hawksquill's loyalties remained unplaced, and her path obscure.

It was obscure no more. The children of the children of Time: who would have thought? A Fool, and a Cousin; a Journey, and a Host. The Least Trumps! She smiled grimly, circling around the mammoth Empire Hotel in which Eigenblick had installed himself, and decided on a charm, a thing she rarely resorted to.

She inserted the Vulpes into the cavernous parking garage beneath the hotel. Armed guards and attendants patrolled the doors and elevators. She found herself in a line of vehicles being checked and examined. She stilled the car's growl, and took a Morocco-leather envelope from the glove-box. From this she extracted a small white fragment of bone. It was a bone taken from a pure black cat which had been boiled alive in the tenement kitchen of La Negra, an espiritista for whom Hawksquill had once had occasion to do a great favor. It might have been a toebone, or part of the maxillary process; certainly La Negra didn't know; she'd hit on it only after a whole day's experimenting before a mirror, separating the bones carefully from the stinking carcass and putting each in turn into her mouth, searching for the one that would make her image in the mirror disappear. It was this one. Hawksquill found the processes of witchcraft vulgar and the cruelty of this one especially repellent; she wasn't herself convinced that there was one bone among the thousand-odd bones in a pure black cat that could make one invisible, but La Negra had assured her that the bone would work whether she believed it or didn't; and she was glad to have the gift just now. She looked around her; the attendants had not yet noticed her car; she left the keys in the lock, thoughtfully; put the little bone into her mouth with a grimace of disgust, and disappeared.

Extracting herself unnoticed from the car took some doing, but the attendants and guards paid no attention to the elevator doors opening and closing on no one (who could predict the vagaries of empty elevators?) and Hawksquill walked out into the lobby, going carefully in the company of the visible so as not to brush against them. The usual unsmiling raincoated men stood at intervals along the walls or sat in lobby armchairs behind dummy newspapers, fooling no one, being fooled by no one but she. At an unseen signal, they began to change their stations just then, like pieces on a board. A large party was coming through the swift-bladed revolving doors, preceded by underlings. Not a moment too soon, Hawksquill thought, for this was the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club proceeding into the lobby. They didn't gaze around themselves inquiringly as ordinary men might on entering such a place, but, spreading out slightly as though more fully to take possession here, they kept their eyes ahead, seeing the future and not the transitory forms of the present. Under each arm was the glove-soft case, on each head the potent homburg long ridiculous on any but men like these.

They sorted themselves into two elevators, those with the highest standing holding the doors for the others, as ancient male ritual dictates; Hawksquill slipped into the less crowded one.

"The thirteenth?"

"The thirteenth."

Someone punched the button for the thirteenth floor with a forceful forefinger. Another consulted a plain wristwatch. They ascended smoothly. They had nothing to say to one another; their plans were made, and the walls, they well knew, had ears. Hawksquill remained pressed against the door, facing their blank faces. The doors opened, and neatly she sidled out; just in time too, for there were hands thrust forward to take the hands of the club members.

"The Lecturer will be right with you."

"If you could wait in this room."

"Can we order anything up for you. The Lecturer has ordered coffee."

They were shepherded leftward by alert suited men. One or two young men, in colored blouses, hands clasped behind them in an uneaseful at-ease, stood by every door. At least, Hawksquill thought, he's wary. From another elevator a red-coated waiter came out carrying a large tray which bore a single tiny cup of coffee. He went rightwards, and Hawksquill followed him. He was admitted through double doors and past guards, and so was Hawksquill at his heels; he came up to an unmarked door, knocked, opened it, and went in. Hawksquill put an invisible foot in the door as he closed it behind him, and then slipped in.


Needle in the Haystack of Time

It was an impersonally-furnished sitting-room with wide windows looking out over the spiky city. The waiter, muttering to himself, passed Hawksquill and exited. Hawksquill took the fragment of bone from her mouth and was carefully putting it away when a farther door opened and Russell Eigenblick came out, yawning, in a blackish, bedragoned silk dressing-gown. He wore on his nose a pair of tiny half-glasses which Hawksquill hadn't seen before.

He started when he saw her, having expected an empty room.

"You," he said.

Without much grace (she couldn't remember ever having done quite this before), Hawksquill lowered herself onto one knee, bowed profoundly, and said, "I am your Majesty's humble servant."

"Get up," Eigenblick said. "Who let you in here?"

"A black cat," Hawksquill said, rising. "It doesn't matter. We haven't much time."

"I don't talk to journalists."

"I'm sorry," Hawksquill said. "That was an imposition. I'm not a journalist."

"I thought not!" he said, triumphantly. He snatched the spectacles from his face as though he had just remembered they were there. He moved toward an intercom on the phony Louis Quatorze desk.

"Wait," Hawksquill said. "Tell me this. Do you want, after eight hundred years of sleep, to fail in your enterprise?"

He turned slowly to regard her.

"You must remember," Hawksquill went on, "how once you were abased before a certain Pope, and were forced to hold his stirrup, and run beside his horse."

Eigenblick's face was suffused. It grew a bright red different from the red of his beard. He rifled fury at Hawksquill from his eagle eyes. "Who are you?" he said.

"At this moment," Hawksquill said, gesturing toward the farther end of the suite, "men await you who intend to abase you in just such a degree. Only more cleverly. So that you will never notice being clipped. I mean the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club. Or have they presented themselves to you under some other name?"

"Nonsense," Eigenblick said. "I've never heard of this so-called club." But his eyes clouded; perhaps, somewhere, somewhen, he had been warned. . . . "And what could you mean about the Pope? A charming gentleman who I've never met." His eyes not meeting hers, he picked up his little coffee and drank it off.

But she had him: she saw that. If he didn't ring to have guards eject her, he would listen. "Have they promised you high position?" she asked.

"The highest," he said after a long pause, gazing out the window.

"It might interest you to know that for some years those gentlemen have employed me on various errands. I think I know them. Was it the Presidency?"

He said nothing. It was.

"The Presidency," Hawksquill said, "is no longer an office. It's a room. A nice one, but only a room. You must refuse it. Politely. And any other blandishments they may offer. I'll explain your next moves later. . . ."

He turned on her. "How is it you know these things?" he said. "How do you know me?"

Hawksquill returned his gunlike look with one of her own, and said, in her best wizard's manner, "There is much that I know."

The intercom buzzed. Eigenblick went to it, looked thoughtfully at the array of bottons on it, finger to his lips, and then punched one. Nothing happened. He pushed another, and a voice made of static spoke: "Everything is ready, sir."

"Ja," Eigenblick said. "Moment." He released the button, realized he hadn't been heard, pressed another, and repeated himself. He turned to Hawksquill. "However it is you've found out these things," he said, "you have obviously not found out all. You see," he went on, a broad smile on his face and his eyes cast upward with the look of one confident of his election, "I'm in the cards. Nothing that can happen to me can deflect a destiny set elsewhere long ago. Protected. All this was meant to be."

"Your Majesty," Hawksquill said, "perhaps I haven't made myself clear. . . ."

"Will you stop calling me that!" he said, furious.

"Sorry. Perhaps I haven't made myself clear. I know very well that you are in the cards—a deck of very pretty ones, with trumps at least obstensibly designed to foretell and encourage the return of your old Empire; designed and drawn, I would guess, some time in the reign of Rudolf II, and printed in Prague. They have been put to other uses since. Without your being, so to speak, any the less in them."

"Where are they?" he said, suddenly coming toward her, avaricious hands like claws held out. "Give them to me. I must have them."

"If I may go on," Hawksquill said.

"They're my property," Eigenblick said.

"Your Empire's," she said. "Once." She stared him into silence, and said: "If I may go on: I know you're in the cards. I know what powers put you there, and—a little—to what end. I know your destiny. What you must believe, if you are to accomplish it, is that I am in it."

"You."

"Come to warn you, and to aid you. I have powers. Great enough to have discovered all this, to have found you out, needle in the haystack of Time. You have need of me. Now. And in time to come."

He considered her. She saw doubt, hope, relief, fear, resolution come and go in his big face. "Why," he said, "was I never told about you?"

"Perhaps," she said, "because they didn't know about me."

"Nothing is hidden from them."

"Much is. You would do well to learn that."

He chewed his cheek for a moment, but the battle was over. "What's in it for you?" he said. The intercom buzzed again.

"We'll discuss my reward later," she said. "Just now, before you answer that, you'd better decide what you will tell your visitors."

"Will you be with me?" he said, suddenly needful.

"They mustn't see me," Hawksquill said. "But I'll be with you." A cheap trick, a cat's bone; and yet (she thought, as Eigenblick punched at the intercom) just the thing to convince the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, if he remembered his youth at all, that indeed she did have the powers she claimed. With his back to her, she disappeared; when he turned to face her, or the place where she had been, she said, "Shall we go meet the Club?"


Crossroads

The day was gray, a certain pale and moist gray, when Auberon descended from the bus at the crossroads. He had had words with the driver about being let off at this particular place; had had difficulty at first in describing it, then in convincing the driver that he actually passed such a spot. The driver shook his head slowly in negative as Auberon described, his eyes not meeting Auberon's, and said "Nope, nope," softly, as though lost in thought; a transparent lie, Auberon knew, the man simply didn't want to make the slightest variation in his routine. Coldly polite, Auberon described the place again, then sat in the first place behind the driver, his eyes peeled; and tapped the driver when the place approached. Got out, triumphant, a sentence forming on his tongue about the hundreds of times the man must have passed this place, if that was the level of observation to be found in the men the public was urged to leave the driving to, etc.; but the door hissed shut and the long gray bus ground its gears like teeth and lurched away.

The fingerboard he stood by pointed as always down the road toward Edgewood; more haggard, leaning at a more senescent angle, the name more time-erased than he remembered or than it had been when he had last seen it, but the same. He started down the looping road, brown as milk-chocolate after the rain, stepping along cautiously and surprised by the loudness of his footfalls. He hadn't understood how much he had been deprived of during his months in the City. The Art of Memory could make a plan of his past where all this had perhaps a place, but it couldn't have restored to him this fullness: these odors, sweet and moist and vivifying, as though the air had a clear liquid texture; the constant low nameless sound filling up the air, whispering loud to his dull ear, pricked out with birdsong; the very sense of volume, of far distances and middle distances made up out of lines and groups of new-leaving trees and the roll and heap of the earth. He was able to survive outside all this well enough—air was air, after all, here or in the City—but, once plunged down within it again, he might have felt returned to a native element, might have uncurled within it, soul expanding like a butterfly sprung from its confining coccoon. In fact he did stretch his arms out, breathe deeply, and quote a few lines of verse. But his soul was a cold stone.

As he went along, he felt himself to be accompanied by someone: someone young, someone not in a lank brown overcoat, someone not hung over, someone who tugged at his sleeve, reminding him that here he'd used to pull his bike over the wall to return by secret ways to the Summer House and the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, there he'd fallen out of a tree, there bent down with Doc to hear the mutter of closeted woodchucks. It had all happened once, to someone, to this insistent someone. Not to him . . . The gray stone pillars topped with gray oranges rose up where and when they always would. He reached up to one to touch the pitted surface, clammy and slick with spring. Down at the end of the drive his sisters awaited him on the porch.

Now for God's sake. His homecoming was to be no more secret than his leaving—and as he thought this, he realized for the first time that he had intended it to be secret, had supposed himself able to slip back into the house without anyone's noticing he had been gone for some eighteen months. Foolish! And yet the last thing he wanted was a fuss made over him. Too late, anyway, for as he stood by the gate-posts uncertainly, Lucy had spied him and leapt up waving. She pulled Lily after her to run and greet him; Tacey more regally kept to the peacock chair, dressed in a long skirt and one of his old tweed jackets.

"Hi, hi," he said, casual but suddenly aware of the figure he must cut, unshaven and bloodshot, with his shopping bag and the City dirt beneath his nails and in his hair. So clean and vernal Lucy and Lily seemed, so glad, that he was torn between drawing back from them and kneeling before them to beg their forgiveness; and though they embraced him and took his bag from him, talking both at once, he knew they read him.

"You'll never guess who came here," Lucy said.

"An old woman," Auberon said, glad that once in his life he could be sure he guessed right, "with a gray bun. How's Mom? How's Dad?"

"But who she is you'll never guess," Lily said.

"Did she tell you I was coming? I never said it to her."

"No. But we knew. But guess."

"She is," Lucy said, "a cousin. In a way. Sophie found out. It was years ago . . ."

"In England," Lily said. "Do you know the Auberon you're named after? Well, he was Violet Bramble Drinkwater's son . . ."

"But not John Drinkwater's! A love child . . ."

"How do you keep all these people straight?" Auberon asked.

"Anyway. Back in England Violet Bramble had an affair. Before she married John. With someone named Oliver Hawksquill."

"A swain," Lily said.

"And got pregnant, and that was Auberon. And this lady . . ."

"Hello, Auberon," Tacey said. "How was the City?"

"Gee, just great," Auberon said, feeling a hard lump rise in his throat and water spring to his eyes. "Great."

"Did you walk?" Tacey asked.

"No, the bus, actually." They were silent a moment at that. No help for it. "So listen. How's Mom? How's Dad?"

"Fine. She got your card."

A horror swept him as he thought of the few cards and letters he had sent from the City, evasive and bragging, or uncommunicative, or horribly facetious. The last one, Mom's birthday, he had found, oh God, unsigned in a trash can he was examining, a bouquet of smarmy sentiments; but his silence had been long and he was drunk and he sent it. He saw now that it must have been to her like being stabbed cruelly with a butter knife. He sat down on the steps of the porch, unable just for the moment to go further.


An Awful Mess

"Well, what do you think, Ma?" Daily Alice asked as she stood looking into the dank darkness of the old icebox.

Momdy was examining the stock inside the cupboards. "Tuna wiggle?" she said doubtfully.

"Oh dear," Alice said. "Smoky will give me a look. You know that look?"

"Oh, I do."

"Well." Beneath her gaze the few damp items on the slatted metal shelves seemed to shrink away. There was a constant drip, as in a cave. Daily Alice thought of the old days, the great white refrigerator chock-full of crisp vegetables and colorful containers, perhaps a varnished turkey or a diamondback ham, and neatly wrapped meats and meals asleep in the icy-breathing freezer. And a cheerful light that winked on to show it all, as on a stage. Nostalgia. She put her hand on a luke-cold milk bottle and said, "Did Rudy come today?"

"No."

"He's really getting too old for that," Alice said. "Lifting big blocks of ice. And he forgets." She sighed, still looking within; Rudy's decline, and the general falling-off in the amenities of life, and the not-so-hot dinner probably awaiting them all, all seemed contained within the zinc-lined icebox.

"Well, don't hold the door open, dear," Momdy said softly. Alice was closing it when the swinging doors of the pantry opened.

"Oh my God," Alice said. "Oh, Auberon."

She came quickly to embrace him, hurrying to him as though he were in deep trouble and she must instantly rescue him. His harrowed look, though, came less from the trouble he was in than from the trip he had just taken through the house, which had assaulted him unmercifully with memories, odors he'd forgotten he knew, scarred furniture and worn rugs and garden-exhibiting windows that filled his eyesight to the brim, as if it had been half a lifetime and not a year and a half he'd been away.

"Hi," he said.

She released him. "Look at you," she said. "What is it?"

"What's what?" he said, attempting a smile, wondering what degradation she read in his features. Daily Alice raised a wondering finger and traced the line of his single eyebrow across his nose. "When did you grow that?"

"Huh?"

Daily Alice touched the place above her own nose where (though faintly, because of her lighter hair) she bore the mark of Violet's descendants.

"Oh." He shrugged. He hadn't actually noticed; he hadn't been studying mirrors much lately. "I dunno." He laughed. "How do you like that?" He stroked it himself. Soft and fine as baby hair, with one or two coarser hairs springing from it. "I must be getting old," he said.

She saw that that was so; that he had crossed in his absence some threshold beyond which life is consumed faster than it increases; she could see the marks of it in his face and the backs of his hands. A hard lump formed in her throat, and she embraced him again so that she wouldn't have to speak. Over her shoulder, to his grandmother, Auberon said, "Hi Momdy, listen, listen, don't get up, don't."

"Well, you're a bad boy, not to have written your mother," Momdy said. "To tell us you were coming. Not a thing for supper."

"Oh, that's okay, that's okay," he said, releasing himself from his mother and coming to kiss Momdy's feathery soft cheek. "How have you been?"

"The same, the same." She looked up at him from where she sat, studying him shrewdly. He'd always had the sense his grandmother knew some discreditable secret about him, and if she could just squeeze it between the thick layers of her usual discourse, it would be revealed. "I go on," she said. "You've grown."

"Gee, I don't think so."

"Either that or I'd forgotten how big you'd got."

"Yeah, that's it. . . . Well." The two women looked him over from the heights of two generations, seeing different views. He felt examined. He knew he ought to take off his overcoat, but he had forgotten exactly what was underneath it; he sat instead at the far end of the table and said again, "Well."

"Tea," Alice said. "How about some tea? And you can tell us all your adventures."

"Tea would be great," he said.

"And how's George?" Momdy asked. "And his people?"

"Oh, fine." He hadn't been to Old Law Farm in months. "Fine, same as ever." He shook his head in amusement at funny George. "That crazy farm."

"I remember," she said, "when that was really such a nice place. Years ago. The corner house, that was the one the Mouse family first lived in . . ."

"Still do, still do," Auberon said. He glanced at his mother, who was busy with teapot and water at the big stove; surreptitiously she brushed her eyes with the sleeve of her sweatshirt, and then saw that he' caught her at it, and turned to face him, teapot in her hands.

". . . and after Phyllis Townes died," Momdy was going on, "well that was a protracted illness, her doctor thought he'd chased it down to her kidneys, but she thought . . ."

"So how was it, really?" Alice said to her son. "Really."

"Really it wasn't so hot," Auberon said. He looked down. "I'm sorry."

"Oh, oh well," she said.

"For not writing and all. There wasn't much to say."

"That's okay. We were afraid for you, that's all."

He lifted his eyes. He really hadn't thought of that. Here he'd been swallowed down by the teeming terrible City, swallowed as by a dragon's mouth and hardly been heard of again; of course they'd been afraid for him. As it had once before in this kitchen, a window rose within him and he saw, through it, his own reality. People loved him, and worried about him; his personal worth didn't even enter into it. He lowered his eyes again, ashamed. Alice turned back to the stove. His grandmother filled the silence with reminiscence, the details of dead relatives' sickness, remission, relapse, decline and death. "Mm, mm-hm," he said, nodding, studying the scarred surface of the table. He had sat, without choosing to, at his old place, at his father's right hand, Tacey's left.

"Tea," Alice said. She put the teapot on a trivet, and patted its fat belly. She put a cup before him. And waited, then, hands folded, for him to pour it, or for something; he glanced up at her and was about to try to speak, to answer the question he saw posed in her, if he could, if he could think of words, when the double doors of the pantry flew open and Lily and the twins came in, and Tony Buck.

"Hi Uncle Auberon," the twins (Bud the boy and Blossom the girl) shouted in unison, as though Auberon hadn't quite arrived yet and they had to call far to be heard. Auberon stared at them: they seemed to be twice the size they had been, and they could talk: they hadn't been able to when he left, had they? Hadn't he last seen them still carried fore and aft by their mother in a canvas carrier? Lily, at their insistence, began to go through cupboards, looking for good things to eat, the twins were unimpressed by the solitary teapot but certainly it was time for something. Tony Buck shook Auberon's hand and said, "Hey, how was the City?"

"Oh, he;, swell," Auberon said in a tone like Tony's, hearty and no-nonsense; Tony turned to Alice and said, "So Tacey said maybe we should have a couple rabbits tonight."

"Oh, Tony, that would be terrific," Alice said.

Tacey herself came through the door then, calling Tony's name. "Is that okay, Ma?" she said.

"It's great," Alice said. "Better than tuna wiggle."

"Kill the fatted calf," Momdy said, the only one there to whom the phrase would have occurred. "And fricassee it."

"Smoky'll be so happy," said Alice to .Auberon. "He loves rabbit, but he can't ever feel it's his place to suggest it."

"Listen," Auberon said, "don't make any fuss just for . . ." He couldn't, in his self-effacement, bring himself to say personal pronouns. "I mean just because . . ."

"Uncle Auberon," said Bud, "did you see any muggerds?"

"Hm?"

"Muggerds." He curved his fingers predatorily at Auberon. "Who get you. In the City."

"Well, as a matter of fact . . ." But Bud had noticed (he hadn't ever quite taken his eyes from her) that his sister Blossom had acquired a cookie of a sort that hadn't been offered to him, and he had to hurry to put in a claim.

"Now out, out!" said Lily.

"You wanna go see the rabbits die?" her daughter asked her, taking her hand.

"No, I don't," said Lily, but Blossom, wanting her mother with her for the dread and fascinating event, pulled her by the hand.

"It only takes a second," she said reassuringly, drawing her mother after her. "Don't be afraid." They went out through the summer kitchen and the door that led to the kitchen-garden, Lily, Bud and Blossom, and Tony. Tacey had filled a cup for herself and one for Momdy, and with them backed out the pantry doors; Momdy followed her.

Grump grump grump said the doors behind them.

Alice and Auberon sat alone in the kitchen, the storm of them having passed as quickly as it came on.

"So," Auberon said. "It seems like everybody's fine here."

"Yes. Fine."

"Do you mind," he said, rising slowly like an old man, much tried, "if I get myself a drink?"

"No, sure," Alice said. "There's some sherry there, and other things, I think."

He got down a dusty whiskey bottle.

"No ice," said Alice. "Rudy didn't come."

"He still cuts ice?"

"Oh yes. But he's been sick lately. And Robin, you know, his grandson—well, you know Robin; he isn't much help. Poor old man."

Absurdly, this was the last straw. Poor old Rudy . . . "Too bad, too bad," he said, his voice shaky. "Too bad." He sat, his glassful of whiskey the saddest thing he had ever seen. His vision was clouded and sparkling. Alice rose slowly, alarmed. "I made a real mess of it, Ma," he said. "A real awful mess." He put his face in his hands, the awful mess a harsh, gathering thing in his throat and breast. Alice, unsure, came and put her arm tentatively around his shoulder, and Auberon, though he hadn't done so in years, never even for Sylvie, not once, knew he was about to sob like a child. The awful mess gathered weight and force and, pressing its way out, opened his mouth and shook his frame violently, causing sounds he had not known he could make. There there, he said to himself, there there: but it wouldn't stop, release made it grow, there were vast volumes of it to be expelled, he put his head down on the kitchen table and bawled.

"Sorry, sorry," he said when he could speak again. "Sorry, sorry."

"No," Alice said, her arm around his resistant overcoat; "no, sorry for what?" He raised his head suddenly, throwing off her arm, and, after another gasping sob, ceased, his chest heaving. "Was it," Alice said softly, warily, "the dark girl?"

"Oh," Auberon said, "partly, partly."

"And that stupid bequest."

"Partly."

She saw peeking from his pocket a hanky, and pulled it out for him. "Here," she said, shocked to see in his streaming face not her baby boy in tears, but a grownup she hardly knew transformed by grief. She looked at the hanky she offered him. "What a pretty thing," she said. "It looks like . . ."

"Yes," Auberon said, taking it from her and mopping his face. "Lucy made it." He blew his nose. "It was a present. When I left. Open it when you come home, she said." He laughed, or cried again, or both, and swallowed. "Pretty, huh." He stuffed it back in his pocket and sat, back bent, staring. "Oh God," he said. "Well, that's embarrassing."

"No," she said, "no." She put her hand over his. She was in a quandary; he needed advice, and she couldn't give it to him; she knew where advice could be got, but not whether it could be given to him there, or whether it was right for her to send him. "It's all right, you know," she said, "it really is, because," and then bethought herself. "Because it's all right; it'll be all right."

"Oh sure," he said, sighing a great, shuddering sigh. "All over now."

"No," Alice said, and took his hand more firmly. "No, it's not all over, but . . . Well, whatever happens, it'll all be part of, well part of what's to be, won't it? I mean there's nothing that couldn't be, isn't that right?"

"I don't know," Auberon said. "What do I know."

She held his hand, but oh, he was too big now for her to gather him to her, hug him, cover him up with herself and tell him all, tell him the long, long tale of it, so long and strange that he would fall asleep long before it was over, soothed by her voice and her warmth and the beat of her heart and the calm certainty of her telling: and then, and then, and then: and more wonderful than that: and strange to say: and the way it all turns out: the story she hadn't known how to tell when he was young enough to tell it to, the story she knew now only when he was too big to gather up and whisper it to, too big to believe it, though it would all happen, and to him. But she couldn't bear to see him in this darkness, and say nothing. "Well," she said, not releasing his hand; she cleared her throat of the huskiness that had gathered there (was she glad, or the reverse, that all her own storms of tears had been wept, years ago?) and said, "Well, will you do something for me, anyway?"

"Yes, sure."

"Tonight, no, tomorrow morning—do you know where the old gazebo is? That little island? Well, if you follow that stream up, you come to a pool—with a waterfall?"

"Sure, yes."

"Okay," she said. She took a deep breath, said "Well" again, and gave him instructions, and pledged him to follow them exactly, and told him something of the reasons why he must, but not all; and he agreed, in a cloud, but having wept out before her any reservations he might have had to such a scheme, and such reasons.

The door to the kitchen-garden opened, and Smoky came in through it; before he came around the corner of the summer kitchen, though, Alice had patted Auberon's hand, smiled, and pressed her forefinger to her lips, and then to his.

"Rabbit tonight?" Smoky was saying as he came into the kitchen. "What's all the excitement?" He did an extravagant double-take when he saw Auberon, and books slipped from beneath his arm to the floor.

"Hi, hi," said Auberon, glad at least to have taken one of them by surprise.


Slowly I Turn

Sophie had also known that Auberon was on his way home, though the bus had thrown off her calculations by a day. She was full of advice, and had many questions to ask; but Auberon wanted no advice, and she saw that her questions would get no answers either, so she didn't ask them: what information he chose to offer was all she would get for the moment, scantily though it clothed his City months.

At dinner she said: "Well. It's nice to have everybody back. For one night."

Auberon, devouring victuals like a man who's lived for months on hot dogs and day-old Danish, looked up at her, but she had looked away, not conscious apparently of having said anything odd; and Tacey began a story about Cherry Lake's divorce after only a year of marriage.

"This is delicious, Ma," Auberon said, and helped himself again, wondering.

Later, in the library, he and Smoky compared cities: Smoky's, from years ago, and Auberon's.

"The best thing," Smoky said, "or the exciting thing, was the feeling you always had of being at the head of the parade. I mean even if all you did was sit in your room, you felt it, you knew that outside in the streets and in the buildings it was going forward, boom boom boom, and you were part of it, and everybody everywhere else was just stumbling along behind. Do you know what I mean?"

"I guess," Auberon said. "I guess things have changed." Hamletish in a black sweater and pants he'd found among his old clothes, he sat somewhat folded up in a tall buttoned leather chair. One light lit shone on the brandy bottle Smoky had opened. Alice had suggested he and Auberon have a long talk; but they were having difficulty finding subjects. "It always felt to me like everybody everywhere else had forgotten all about us." He held out his glass, and Smoky put an inch of brandy in it.

"Well, but the crowds," Smoky said. "The bustle, and all the well-dressed people; everybody hurrying to appointments . . ."

"Hm," Auberon said.

"I think it's . . ."

"Well I mean I think I know what you say you thought, I mean that you think it was . . ."

"I think I thought . . ."

"I guess it's changed," Auberon said.

A silence fell. Each stared into his glass. "So," Smoky said. "Anyway. How did you meet her?"

"Who?" Auberon stiffened. There were subjects he had no intention of discussing with Smoky. That with their cards and their second sight they could probe his heart and learn his business was bad enough.

"The lady who came," Smoky said. "That Miss Hawksquill. Cousin Ariel, as Sophie says."

"Oh. In a park. We fell into conversation. . . . A little park that said it was built by, you know, old John and his company, back when."

"A little park," Smoky said, surprised, "with funny curving paths, that . . ."

"Yeah," Auberon said.

"That lead in, only they don't, and . . ."

"Yeah."

"Fountains, statues, a little bridge . . ."

"Yeah, yeah."

"I used to go there," Smoky said. "How do you like that."

Auberon didn't, really. He said nothing.

"It always reminded me," Smoky said, "for some reason, of Alice." Suddenly flung back into the past, Smoky with great vividness remembered the small summery park, and felt—tasted, almost, with the mind's tongue—the season of his first love for his wife. When he was Auberon's age. "How do you like that," he said again, dreamily, tasting a cordial in which a whole summer's fruits were long ago distilled. He looked at Auberon. He was staring into his glass gloomily. Smoky sensed that he was approaching a sore spot or subject. How odd, though, the same park . . . "Well," he said, and cleared his throat. "She seems like quite a woman."

Auberon ran his hand over his brow.

"I mean this Hawksquill person."

"Oh. Oh, yes." Auberon cleared his throat, and drank. "Crazy, I thought, maybe."

"Oh? Oh, I don't think so. No more than . . . She certainly had a lot of energy. Wanted to see the house from top to bottom. She had some interesting things to say. We even crawled up into the old orrery. She said she had one, in her house in the City, different, but built on the same principles, maybe by the same person." He had grown animated, hopeful. "You know what? She thought we could get it working again. I showed her it was all rusted, because, you know, the main wheel for some reason sticks out into the air, but she said, well, she thought the basic works are still okay. I don't see how she could tell that, but wouldn't that be fun? After all these years. I thought I'd have a shot at it. Clean it up, and see . . ."

Auberon looked at his father. He began to laugh. That broad, sweet, simple face. How could he have ever thought . . . "You know something?" he said. "I used to think, when I was a kid, that it did move."

"What?"

"Sure. I thought it did move. I thought I could prove that it moved."

"You mean by itself? How?"

"I didn't know how," Auberon said. "But I thought it did, and that you all knew it did, and didn't want me to know."

Smoky laughed too. "Well, why?" he said. "I mean why would we keep it a secret? And anyhow, how could it? What would be the power?"

"I don't know, Dad," Auberon said, laughing more, though the laughter seemed likely to deliquesce into tears. "By itself. I don't know." He rose, unfolding himself from the buttoned chair. "I thought," he said, "oh, hell, I can't recreate it, why I thought it was important, I mean why that was important, but I thought I was going to get the goods on you. . . ."

"What? What?" Smoky said. "Well why didn't you ask? I mean a simple question . . ."

"Dad," Auberon said, "do you think there's ever been a simple question around here you could ask?"

"Well," Smoky said.

"Okay," Auberon said. "Okay, I'll ask you a simple question, okay?"

Smoky sat upright in his chair. Auberon wasn't laughing any more. "Okay," he said.

"Do you believe in fairies?" Auberon asked.

Smoky looked up at his tall son. Through the whole of their lives together, it had been as though he and Auberon had been back to back, fixed that way and unable to turn. They had had to communicate by indirection, through others, or by craning their necks and talking out the sides of their mouths; they had had to guess at each other's faces and actions. Now and then one or the other would try a quick spin around to catch the other unawares, but it never worked, quite, the other was still behind and facing away, as in the old vaudeville act. And the effort of communication in that posture, the effort of making oneself clear, had often grown too much for them, and they'd given it up, mostly. But now—maybe because of what had happened to him in the City, whatever that was, or maybe only increase of time wearing away the bond that had both held them and held them apart, Auberon had turned around. Slowly I turn. And all that was left then was for Smoky himself to turn and face him. "Well," he said, " 'believe', I don't know; 'believe', that's a word . . ."

"Uh uh," said Auberon. "No quotes."

Auberon stood over him now, looking down, waiting. "Okay," Smoky said. "The answer is no."

"Okay!" Auberon said, grimly triumphant.

"I never did."

"Okay."

"Of course," Smoky said, "it wouldn't have been right to say so, you know, or really ask right out what was what here; I never wanted to spoil anything by not—not joining in. So I never said anything. Never asked questions, never. Especially not simple ones. I just hope you noticed that, because it wasn't always easy."

"I know," Auberon said.

Smoky looked down. "I'm sorry about that," he said; "about deceiving you—if I did, I suppose I didn't; and sort of spying on you all the time, trying to figure it out—when all the time I was supposed to know about it all, the same as you." He sighed. "It's not so easy," he said. "Living a lie."

"Wait a sec," Auberon said. "Dad."

"None of you seemed to mind, really. Except you, I think. Well. And it didn't seem that they minded, that I didn't believe in them, the Tale went on and all, just the same-didn't it? Only I did, I admit, feel a little jealous; anyway I used to. Jealous of you. Who knew."

"Listen, Dad, listen."

"No, it's all right," Smoky said. If he were going to face front then he would by God face front. "Only . . . Well, it always seemed to me that you—just you, not the others—could have explained it. That you wanted to explain it, but couldn't. No, it's all right." He held up his hand to forestall whatever evasion or equivocation his son was about to make. "They, I mean Alice, and Sophie, and Aunt Cloud—even the girls—they said everything they could, I think, only nothing they could say was ever an explanation, not an explanation, even though maybe they thought it was, maybe they thought they'd explained it over and over and I was just too dumb to grasp it; maybe I was. But I used to think that you—I don't know why—that I could maybe understand you, and that you were always just about to spill the beans. . . ."

"Dad . . ."

"And that we got off on the wrong foot, way back, because you had to hide it, and so you sort of had to hide from me. . . ."

"No! No no no . . ."

"And I'm sorry, really, if you felt I was always spying on you and intruding and all, but . . ."

"Dad, Dad, will you please just listen a second?"

"But well, as long as we're asking simple questions, I'd like to know what it was that you . . ."

"I didn't know anything!" His shout seemed to awaken Smoky, who looked up to see his son twisted up in an attitude of recrimination or confession, and a mad light in his eye.

"What?"

"I didn't know anything!" Auberon knelt suddenly before his father, his whole childhood giddily inverted; it made him want to laugh insanely. "Nothing!"

"Cut it out," Smoky said, puzzled. "I thought we were getting down to brass tacks here."

"Nothing!"

"Then how come you were always hiding it?"

"Hiding what?"

"What you knew. A secret diary. And all those weird hints.

"Dad. Dad. If I knew anything you didn't know—if I did—would I have thought that old orrery was going around and nobody was admitting to it? And what about the Architecture of Country Houses, that you wouldn't explain to me . . ."

"I wouldn't explain! It was you who thought you knew what it was. . . ."

"Well, and what about Lilac?"

"What about her?"

"Well, what happened to her? Sophie's, I mean. Why didn't anybody tell me?" He gripped his father's hands. "What happened to her? Where did she go?"

"Well?" Smoky said, frustrated beyond endurance. "Where did she?"

They stared at each other wildly, all questions, no answers; and at the same moment saw that. Smoky clapped his hand to his brow. "But how could you have thought I . . . that I . . . I mean wasn't it obvious I didn't know. . . ."

"Well, I wondered," Auberon said. "I thought maybe you were pretending. But I couldn't be sure. How could I be sure? I couldn't take a chance."

"Then why didn't you . . ."

"Don't say it," Auberon said. "Don't say, Why didn't you ask. Just don't."

"Oh, God," Smoky said, laughing. "Oh, dear."

Auberon sat back on the floor, shaking his head. "All that work," he said. "All that effort."

"I think," Smoky said, "I think I'll have another taste of that brandy, if you can reach the bottle." He hunted up his empty snifter, which had rolled away into the darkness. Auberon poured for him, and for himself, and for a long time they sat in silence, glancing now and again at each other, laughing a little, shaking their heads. "Well, isn't that something," Smoky said.

"And wouldn't it really be something," he added after a while, "if none of us knew what was what. If we, if you and I, marched up now to your mother's room . . ." He laughed at the idea. "And said, Hey . . ."

"I don't know," Auberon said. "I bet . . ."

"Yes," Smoky said. "Yes, I'm sure. Well." He remembered Doc, years ago, on a hunting expedition Smoky and he had made one October afternoon: Doc, who was himself Violet's grandson, but who had advised Smoky that day that it was best not to inquire into some things too deeply. Into what's given; what can't be changed. And who could tell now just what Doc himself had known, after all, what he had carried with him to the grave. On the very first day he had come to Edgewood, Great-aunt Cloud had said: The women feel it more deeply, hut the men perhaps suffer from it more. . . . He had come to spend his life with a race of expert secret-keepers, and he had learned much; it was no wonder really that he'd fooled Auberon, he'd learned from masters how to keep secrets, even if he had none to keep. Yet he did have secrets, he suddenly thought, he did: though he couldn't tell Auberon what had happened to Lilac, there was more than one fact about her and about the Barnable family that he still kept to himself, and had no intention of ever telling his son; and he felt guilty about that. Face to face: well. And was it suspicion of some such thing which made Auberon rub his brow, staring again into his glass?

No; Auberon was thinking of Sylvie, and of what his mother had instructed him to do tomorrow in the woods above the lake island, the outlandish thing; and how she had pressed her finger to her lips, and then to his, enjoining silence on him when his father came into the room. He raised his forefinger and stroked the new hair that had recently and unaccountably joined his two eyebrows into one.

"In a way, you know," Smoky said, "I'm sorry you made it back."

"Hm?"

"No, of course I don't mean I'm sorry, only . . . Well, I had a plan; if you didn't write or show up soon, I was going to set out to find you."

"You were?"

"Yup." He laughed. "Oh it would have been quite an expedition. I was already thinking of what to pack, and all."

"You should have," Auberon said, grinning with relief that he had in fact not.

"It might have been fun. Seeing the City again." He was lost a moment in old visions. "Well. I probably would have got lost myself."

"Yes." He smiled at his father. "Probably. But thanks, Dad."

"Well," Smoky said. "Well. Gosh, look at the time."


Embracing Himself

He followed his father up the wide front staircase.

The stairs creaked where and when they always had. The nighttime house was as familiar to him as the day-house, as full of details he had forgotten he knew.

They parted at a turning of the corridor.

"Well, sleep well," Smoky said, and they stood together in the pool of light from the candle Smoky held. Perhaps if Auberon hadn't been encumbered with his squalid bags and Smoky with the candle, they would have embraced; perhaps not. "You can find your room?"

"Sure."

"Goodnight."

"Goodnight."

He took the fifteen and a half steps—bumping his flank against the absurd commode he always forgot was there—and put out his hand, and it touched his faceted glass knob. He lit no light once inside, though he knew that a candle and matches were there on the night-table, knew how to find them, knew the scarred underside of the table where he could strike the match. The odor (his own, cold, faint, but familiar, with an admixture of child's smell, Lily's twins who had camped there) spoke in a constant old murmur to him of past things. He stood unmoving for a moment, seeing by smell the armchair where much of his childhood's happiness had been had, the armchair just large enough and unsprung enough for him to curl in with a book or a pad of paper, and the calm lamp beside it, and the table where cookies and milk or tea and toast could glow warmly in the lamplight; and the wardrobe from out whose door, when left ajar, ghosts and hostile figures used to steal to frighten him (what had become of those figures, once so familiar? Dead, dead of loneliness, with no one to spook); and the narrow bed and its fat quilt and its two pillows. From an early age he'd insisted on having two pillows, though he'd only rested his head on one. He liked the rich luxury of them: inviting. All there. The weight of the odors was heavy on his soul, like chains, like old burdens reassumed.

He undressed in the dark and crawled into the cold bed. It was like embracing himself. Since the adolescent spurt of growing that had brought him to Daily Alice's height, his feet, when he was in this bed, curled down over the end, and had made two depressions there in the mattress. His feet found them now. The lumps were where they had always been. There was in fact only one pillow, and it smelled vaguely pissy. Cat? Child? He wouldn't sleep, he thought; he couldn't decide whether he wished he had been bold enough to gulp more of Smoky's brandy or glad that this agony was his now, a lot to make up for, starting tonight. He had, anyway, plenty to occupy his wide-awake thoughts. He rolled over carefully into Position Two of his unvarying bedtime choreography, and lay that way long awake in the suffocating familiar darkness.