Little, Big

IV.

Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,

The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bels beyond the starres heard,

the souls blood,

The land of spices; something understood.

—George Herbert

"Christmas," said Doctor Drinkwater as his red-cheeked face sped smoothly toward Smoky's, "is a kind of day, like no other in the year, that doesn't seem to succeed the days it follows, if you see what I mean." He came close to Smoky in a long, expert circle and slid away. Smoky, jerking forward and backward, hands not neatly clasped behind like Doc's but extended, feeling the air, thought he saw. Daily Alice, whose hands were inside an old tatty muff, went by him smoothly, glancing once at his unprogress and making, just to be mean, a laughing, swooping figure as she went away, which was however outside his ken, since his eyes couldn't seem to leave his own feet.


Agreement with Newton

"I mean," Doctor Drinkwater said, reappearing beside him, "that every Christmas seems to follow immediately after the last one; all the months that came between don't figure in. Christmases succeed each other, not the falls they follow."

"That's right," said Mother, making stately progress around. Behind her, like the wooden ducklings attached to wooden ducks, she drew her two granddaughters. "It seems you just get through one and there's another."

"Mmm," said Doc. "Not what I meant exactly." He veered off like a fighter plane, and slipped an arm through Sophie's arm. "How's every little thing," Smoky heard him say, and heard her laugh before they swept off, listing both together.

"Getting better every year," Smoky said, and suddenly turned around involuntarily. He was back in Daily Alice's path, collision course, nothing he could do. He wished he'd strapped a pillow to his ass as they do in comic postcards. Alice grew large, and halted abruptly and expertly.

"Do you think Tacey and Lily should go in?" she said.

"I leave that up to you." Mother drew them past again on their sled; their round, fur-circled faces were bright as berries; then they were gone again, and so was Alice. Let the womenfolk consult, he thought. He had to master the simple forward progress; they were making him dizzy, appearing and disappearing like that. "Woops," he said, and would have lost it, but Sophie appearing suddenly behind him bore him up, propelled him forward. "How have you been?" he said nonchalantly; it seemed the thing, to greet each other as they all went around.

"Unfaithful," she said; the cold word made a small cloud on the air.

Smoky's left ankle buckled, and his right runner just then sped away on its own. He spun around and landed hard on the ice, on the rudimentary tail so vulnerable on one so fleshless behind. Sophie was circling him, her laughter almost making her fall too.

Just sit here a while till my tail freezes up, Smoky thought. Sit gripped in ice like the feet of bushes until some thaw comes. . . .

The previous week's snow had not cleaved to earth, it was a night's fall only, the rain returned heavily the next morning and George Mouse went sloshing off in it hollow-eyed and confused, having caught, they all thought, Sophie's bug. The rain continued like unassuageable grief, flooding the low broad lawn where the sphinxes decayed mumchance. Then the temperature tumbled, and Christmas Eve morning the world was all iron-gray and glaring in ice, all the color of the iron-gray sky where the sun made a white smear only behind the clouds. The lawn was hard enough to skate on; the house looked like a miniature house for a model railroad, set beside a pond made from a compact-mirror.

Still Sophie circled him. He said: "What do you mean? Unfaithful?"

She only smiled secretly and helped him up, then turned and with some occult motion he saw but could never copy whispered away effortlessly.

He'd do better if he could figure out how the others got around that unalterable law which said that if one skate slid forward, the other had to slide backward. It seemed he could zip zip back and forth in one place forever and be the only one here in agreement with Newton. Till he fell down. There is no perpetual motion. Yet just at that moment he began Somehow to get it, and, numbbummed, made his way across the ice to the steps of the porch, where Cloud sat in state on a fur rug guarding the boots and the thermos.

"So where's this promised snow?" he said, and Cloud displayed her own brand of secret smile. He wrung the neck of the thermos and decapitated it. He poured lemon tea charged with rum into one of the nested cups the cap contained, and one for Cloud. He drank, the steam melting the cold in his nostrils. He felt bleakly, recklessly dissatisfied. Unfaithful! Was that some kind of joke? The jewel of great price which he had had from Daily Alice long ago, in the midst of their first embrace, darkened as pearls can do and turned to nothing when he tried to hang it on Sophie's throat. He never knew what Sophie felt, but couldn't believe, though he'd learned it to be so of Daily Alice, that Sophie didn't know either: that she was torn, bewildered, and withal half-dreaming as much as he. So he only watched her come and go with seeming purpose, and wondered, imagined, supposed.

She came across the lawn with her hands behind her back, then made a foot-across-foot turn and sailed up to the porch. She turned just where the frozen pond ran out, and engraved the ice with a small shower of crystals when she stopped. She sat beside Smoky and took his cup from him, her breath quick with exertion. In her hair Smoky noticed something, a tiny flower, or a jewel made to look like one; he looked closer and saw it was a snowflake, so whole and perfect he could count its arms and tell its parts. As he was saying "A snowflake," another fell beside it, and another.


Letters to Santa

Different families have different methods, at Christmas, of communicating their wishes to Santa. Many send letters, mailing them early and addressing them to the North Pole. These never arrive, postmasters having their own whimsical ways of dealing with them, none involving, delivery.

Another method, which the Drinkwaters had always used though no one could remember how they had hit on it, was to bum their missives in the study fireplace, the tiled one whose blue scenes of skaters, windmills, trophies of the hunt seemed most appropriate, and whose chimney was the highest. The smoke then (the children always insisted on running out to see) vanished into the North, or at least into the atmosphere, for Santa to decipher. A complex procedure, but it seemed to work, and was always done on Christmas Eve when wishes were sharpest.

Secrecy was important, at least for the grown-ups' letters; the kids could never resist telling everybody what they wanted and for Lily and Tacey the letters had to be written by others anyway, and they had to be reminded of the many wishes they'd had as Christmas neared but which had grown small in the interim and slipped through the coarse seine of young desire. Don't you want a brother for Teddy (a bear)? Do you still want a shotgun like Grampa's? Ice skates with double blades?

But the grown-ups could presumably decide these things for themselves.

In the expectant, crackling afternoon of that Eve of ice Daily Alice drew her knees up within a huge armchair and used a folded checkerboard resting on her knees for a desk. "Dear Santa," she wrote, "please bring me a new hot-water bottle, any color but that pink that looks like boiled meat, a jade ring like the one my great-aunt Cloud has, for the right middle finger." She thought. She watched the snow fall on the gray world, still just visible as day died. "A quilted robe," she wrote; "one that comes down to my feet. A pair of fuzzy slippers. I would like this baby to be easier than the other two to have. The other stuff is not so important if you could manage that. Ribbon candy is nice, and you can't find it anywhere any more. Thanking you in advance, Alice Barnable (the older sister)." Since childhood she had always added that, to avoid confusion. She hesitated over the tiny blue notepaper nearly filled with these few desires. "P.S.," she wrote. "If you could bring my sister and my husband back from wherever it is they've gone off together I would be more grateful than I could say. ADB."

She folded this absently. Her father's typewriter could be heard in the strange snow-silence. Cloud, cheek in hand, wrote with the stub of a pencil at the drum-table, her eyes moist, perhaps with tears, though her eyes often seemed bedimmed lately; old age only, probably. Alice rested her head back against the chair's soft breast, looking upward.

Above her, Smoky charged with rum-tea sat down in the imaginary study to begin his letter. He spoiled one sheet because the rickety writing-table there rocked beneath his careful pen; he shimmed the leg with a matchbook and began again.

"My dear Santa, First of all it's only right that I explain about last year's wish. I won't excuse myself by saying I was a little drunk, though I was, and I am (it's getting to be a Christmas habit, as everything about Christmas gets to be a habit, but you know all about that). Anyway, ill shocked you or strained your powers by such a request I'm sorry; I meant only to be flip and let off a little steam. I know (I mean I assume) it's not in your power to give one person to another, but the fact is my wish was granted. Maybe only because I wanted it then more than anything, and what you want so much you're just likely to get. So I don't know whether to thank you or not. I mean I don't know whether you're responsible; and I don't know whether I'm grateful."

He chewed the end of his pen for a moment, thinking of last Christmas morning when he had gone into Sophie's room to wake her, so early (Tacey wouldn't wait) that blank nighttime still ruled the windows. He wondered if he should relate the story. He'd never told anyone else, and the deep privacy of this about-to-becremated letter tempted him to confidences. But no.

It was true what Doc had said, that Christmas succeeds Christmas rather than the days it follows. That had become apparent to Smoky in the last few days. Not because of the repeated ritual, the tree sledded home, the antique ornaments lovingly brought out, the Druid greenery hung on the lintels. It was only since last Christmas that all that had become imbued for him with dense emotion, an emotion having nothing to do with Yuletide, a day which for him as a child had had nothing like the fascination of Hallowe'en, when he went masked and recognizable (pirate, clown) in the burnt and smoky night. Yet he saw that it was an emotion that would cover him now, as with snow, each time this season came. She was the cause, not he to whom he wrote.

"Anyway," he began again, "my desires this year are a little clouded. I would like one of those instruments you use to sharpen the blades of an old-fashioned lawn mower. I would like the missing volume of Gibbon (Vol. II) which somebody's apparently taken out to use as a doorstop or something and lost." He thought of listing publisher and date, but a feeling of futility and silence came over him, drifting deep. "Santa," he wrote, "I would like to be one person only, not a whole crowd of them, half of them always trying to turn their backs and run whenever somebody"—Sophie, he meant, Alice, Cloud, Doc, Mother; Alice most of all—"looks at me. I want to be brave and honest and shoulder my burdens. I don't want to leave myself out while a bunch of slyboots figments do my living for me." He stopped, seeing he was growing unintelligible. He hesitated over the complimentary close; he thought of using "Yours as ever," but thought that might sound ironic or sneering, and at last wrote only "Yours &c.," as his father always had, which then seemed ambiguous and cool; what the hell anyway; and he signed it: Evan S. Barnable.

Down in the study they had gathered with eggnog and their letters. Doc had his folded like true correspondence, its backside pimpled with hard-struck punctuation; Mother's was torn from a brown bag, like a shopping list. The fire took them all, though—rejecting only Lily's at first, who tried with a shriek to throw it in the fire's mouth, you can't really throw a piece of paper, she'd learn that as she grew in grace and wisdom—and Tacey insisted they go out to see. Smoky took her by the hand, and lifted Lily onto his shoulders, and they went out into the snowfall made spectral by the house's lights to watch the smoke go away, melting the falling snowflakes as it rose.

When he received these communications, Santa drew the claws of his spectacles from behind his ears and pressed the sore place on the bridge of his nose with thumb and finger. What was it they expected him to do with these? A shotgun, a bear, snowshoes, some pretty things and some useful: well, all right. But for the rest of it . . . He just didn't know what people were thinking anymore. But it was growing late; if they, or anyone else, were disappointed in him tomorrow, it wouldn't be the first time. He took his furred hat from its peg and drew on his gloves. He went out, already unaccountably weary though the journey had not even begun, into the multicolored arctic waste beneath a decillion stars, whose near brilliance seemed to chime, even as the harness of his reindeer chimed when they raised their shaggy heads at his approach, and as the eternal snow chimed too when he trod it with his booted feet.


Room for One More

Soon after that Christmas, Sophie began to feel as though her body were being unwrapped and repacked in a completely different way, a set of sensations that was vertiginous at first when she didn't suspect its cause, and then interesting, awesome even, when she did, and at last (later on, when the process was completed and the new tenant fully installed and making itself at home) comfortable: deeply so at times, like a new kind of sweet sleep; yet expectant too. Expectant! The right word.

There wasn't much her father could say when eventually Sophie's condition was admitted to him, he being just such a one as she carried himself. Being a father, he had to go through motions of solemnity that never quite amounted to censure, and there was never any question of What was to be Done with It—he shuddered to think what would have happened if anyone had thought that kind of thought when he was growing inside Amy Meadows.

"Well, my God, there's room for one more," Mother said, drying a tear. "It's not like it was the first time it ever happened in the world." Like the rest of them, she wondered who the father was, but Sophie wasn't saying, or rather in her smallest voice and with eyes downcast, was saying she wouldn't say. And so the matter had eventually to be dropped.

Though of course Daily Alice had to be told.

It was to Daily Alice that she took her news first, or next to first; her news, and her secret.

"Smoky," she said.

"Oh, Sophie," Alice said. "No."

"Yes," she said, defiant by the door of Alice's room, unwilling to enter further in.

"I can't believe it, that he would."

"Well, you better," Sophie said. "You'd better get used to it, because it's not going away."

Something in Sophie's face-or maybe only the horrid impossibility of what she said—made Alice wonder. "Sophie," she said softly after they had regarded each other in silence for a time, "are you asleep?"

"No." Indignant. But it was early morning; Sophie was in her nightgown; Smoky had only an hour ago stepped down from the tall bed, scratching his head, to go off to school. Sophie had waked Alice: that was so unusual, so reverse of the usual, that for a moment Alice had hoped . . . She lay back against the pillow, and closed her eyes; but she wasn't asleep either.

"Didn't you ever suspect?" Sophie asked. "Didn't you ever think.

"Oh, I guess I did." She covered her eyes with her hand. "Of course I did." The way Sophie said it made it seem she would be disappointed if Alice hadn't known. She sat up, suddenly angry. "But this! I mean the two of you! How could you be so silly?"

"I guess we just got carried away," Sophie said levelly. "You know." But then she lost her brave look before Alice's, and dropped her eyes.

Alice pushed herself up in the bed and sat against the headboard. "Do you have to stand over there?" she said. "I'm not going to hit you or anything." Sophie still stood, a little unsure, a little truculent, looking just like Lily did when she'd spilled something all over her and was afraid she was being summoned for something worse than having it wiped off. Alice waved her over impatiently.

Sophie's bare feet made small sounds on the floor, and when she climbed up on the bed, a strange shy smile on her face, Alice sensed her nakedness under the flannel nightie. It all made her think of years ago, of old intimacies. So few of us, she thought, so much love and so few to spend it on, no wonder we get tangled up. "Does Smoky know?" she asked coolly.

"Yes," Sophie said. "I told him first."

That hurt, that Smoky hadn't told her: the first sensation that could be called pain since Sophie had entered. She thought of him, burdened with that knowledge, and she innocent of it; the thoughts stabbed her. "And what does he intend to do?" she asked next, as in a catechism.

"He wasn't . . . He didn't . . ."

"Well, you'd better decide, hadn't you? The two of you."

Sophie's lip trembled. The store of bravery she had started out with was running out. "Oh, Alice, don't be this way," she pleaded. "I didn't think you'd be this way." She took Alice's hand, but Alice looked away, the knuckles of her other hand pressing her lips. "I mean, I know it was hateful of us," she said, watching Alice's face, trying to gauge it. "Hateful. But, Alice . . ."

"Oh, I don't hate you, Soph." As though not wishing to, but unable not to, Alice's fingers curled themselves closely among Sophie's, though still she looked away. "It's just, well." Sophie watched a struggle taking place within Alice; she didn't dare speak, only held her hand tighter, waiting to see what issue it would have. "See, I thought . . ." She fell silent again, and cleared her throat of an obstruction that had just arisen there. "Well, you know," she said. "You remember: Smoky was chosen for me, that's what I used to think; I used to think that's what our story was."

"Yes," Sophie said, lowering her eyes.

"Only lately, I can't seem to remember that very well. I can't remember them. How it used to be. I can remember, but not . . . the feeling, do you know what I mean? How it used to be, with Auberon; those times."

"Oh, Alice," Sophie said. "How could you forget?"

"Cloud said: when you grow up, you trade what you had as a child for what you have as a grown-up. Or if you don't, you lose it anyway, and get nothing in return." Her eyes had grown tears, though her voice was steady; the tears seemed less part of her than part of the story she told. "And I thought: then I traded them for Smoky. And they arranged that trade. And that was okay. Because even though I couldn't remember them any more, I had Smoky." Now her voice wavered. "I guess I was wrong."

"No!" Sophie said, shocked as if by a blasphemy.

"I guess it's just-ordinary," Alice said, and sighed a tremulous sigh. "I guess you were right, when we were married, that we wouldn't ever have what you and I had once; wait and see, you said. . . ."

"No, Alice, no!" Sophie gripped her sister's arm, as if to hold her back from going further. "That story was true, it was true, I always knew it. Don't, don't ever say it wasn't. It was the most beautiful story I ever heard, and it all came true, just as they said it would. Oh, I was so jealous, Alice, it was wonderful for you and I was so jealous. . . ."

Alice turned to face her. Sophie was shocked by her face: not sad, though tears stood in her eyes; not angry; not anything. "Well," Alice said, "I guess you don't have to be jealous any more, anyway." She pulled Sophie's nightgown up over the ball of her shoulder from which it had slipped. "Now. We have to think what to do. . . ."

"It's a lie," Sophie said.

"What?" Alice looked at her, puzzled. "What's a lie, Soph?"

"It's a lie, it's a lie!" Sophie almost shouted, tearing it out from within her. "It isn't Smoky's at all! I lied to you!" Unable any longer to bear her sister's foreign face, Sophie buried her head in Alice's lap, sobbing. "I'm so sorry. . . . I was so jealous, I wanted to be part of your story, that's all; oh, don't you see he never would, he couldn't, he loves you so much; and I wouldn't have, but I—I missed you. I missed you. I wanted to have a story too, I wanted . . . Oh, Alice."

Alice, taken by surprise, only stroked her sister's head, automatically comforting her. Then: "Wait a minute, Sophie. Sophie, listen." With both her hands she raised Sophie's face from her lap. "Do you mean you never . . ."

Sophie blushed; even through her tears that could be seen. "Well, we did. Once or twice." She held up a forestalling palm. "But it was all my fault, always. He felt so bad." She brushed back, with a furious gesture, her hair, glued to her face with tears. "He always felt so bad."

"Once or twice?"

"Well, three times."

"You mean you . . ."

"Three—and a half." She almost giggled, wiping her face on the sheet. She sniffed. "It took him forever to get around to it, and then he always got so tied in knots it almost wasn't any fun."

Alice laughed, amazed, couldn't help it. Sophie seeing her, laughed too, a laugh like a sob, through her sniffing. "Well," she said, throwing up her hands and letting them fall in her lap; "well."

"But wait a minute," Alice said. "If it wasn't Smoky, who was it?

"Sophie?"

Sophie told her.

"No,"

"Yes."

"Of all people. But—how can you be sure? I mean . . ."

Sophie told her, counting off the reasons on her fingers, why she was sure.

"George Mouse," Alice said. "Of all people. Sophie, that's practically incest."

"Oh, come on," Sophie said dismissively. "It was only one time."

"Well, then he . . ."

"No!" Sophie said, and put her hands on Alice's shoulders. "No. He's not to know. Never. Alice, promise. Cross your heart. Don't ever tell, ever. I'd be so embarrassed."

"Oh, Sophie!" What an amazing person, she thought, what a strange person. And realized, with a rush of feeling, that she had for a long time missed Sophie, too; had forgotten what she was like, even; had even forgotten she missed her. "Well what do we tell Smoky then? That would mean he . . ."

"Yes." Sophie was shivering. Tremors ran around her ribcage. Alice moved aside, and Sophie pulled down the bedclothes and scrambled in, her nightgown riding up, into the pocket of warmth Alice had made. Her feet against Alice's legs were icy, and she wiggled her toes against Alice to warm them.

"It's not true, but it wouldn't be so terrible, would it, to let him think so? I mean it's got to have a father Somehow," Sophie said. "And not George, for heaven's sake." She buried her face against Alice's breasts, and said, after a time, in a tiny voice, "I wish it was Smoky's." And after another time: "It ought to be." And after a longer time still: "Just think. A baby."

It seemed to Alice that she could feel Sophie smile. Was that possible, to feel a smile when someone's face was pressed against you? "Well, I guess, maybe so," she said, and drew Sophie close. "I can't think what else." What a strange way to live, she thought, the way they lived; if she grew to be a hundred she'd never understand it. She smiled herself, bewildered, and shook her head in surrender. What a conclusion! But it had been so long since she had seen Sophie happy—if this was happiness she felt, and damn if it didn't seem to be—she could only be happy with her. Night-blooming Sophie had flowered in the day.

"He does love you," Sophie's muffled voice said. "He'll love you for ever." She yawned hugely, shuddering. "It was all true. It was all true."

Maybe it was. A kind of perception was stealing over her, entwining itself in her as Sophie's long, familiar legs were twining in hers: perhaps she had been wrong, about the trade; perhaps they had stopped teasing her to follow them only because she had long since arrived wherever it was they had been teasing her to come. She hadn't lost them, and yet needn't follow any more because here she was.

She squeezed Sophie suddenly, and said "Ah!"

But if she was here, where was she? And where was Smoky?


A Gift They Had to Give

When it was Smoky's turn, Alice sat on the bed to receive him, as she had Sophie, but propped up on pillows like an Oriental queen, and smoking a brown cigarette of Cloud's as she now and then did when feeling grand. "Well," she said, grandly. "Some fix."

Strangled with embarrassment (and deeply confused, he had thought he had been so careful, they say it's always possible, but how?) Smoky walked around the room picking up small objects and studying them, and putting them down again. "I never expected this," he said.

"No. Well, I guess it's always unexpected." She watched Smoky go back and forth to the window to peep through the curtains at the moon on the snow, as though he were a renegade looking out of his hideout. "Do you want to tell me what happened?"

He turned from the window, his shoulders bent with the weight of it. For so long he had dreaded this exposure, the crowd of ill-dressed characters he had been impersonating caught out, made to stand forth in all their inadequacy. "It was all my fault, first of all," he said. "You shouldn't hate Sophie."

"Oh?"

"I . . . I forced myself on her, really. I mean I plotted it, I . . . like a, like a, well."

"Mmm."

All right, ragamuffins, show yourselves, Smoky thought; it's all up with you. With me. He cleared his throat; he plucked his beard; he told all, or nearly all.

Alice listened, fooling with her cigarette. She tried to blow out with the smoke the lump of sweet generosity she tasted in her throat. She knew she mustn't smile while Smoky told his story, but she felt so kindly toward him, wanted so much to take him in her arms and kiss the soul she saw clearly rising to his lips and eyes, so brave and honest he was being, that at last she said, "You don't have to keep stalking around like that. Come sit down."

He sat, using as little of the bed he had' betrayed as he could. "It was only once or twice, in the end," he said. "I don't mean . . ."

"Three times," she said. "And a half." He blushed fiercely. She hoped that soon he would be able to look at her, and see that she would smile for him. "Well, you know, it's probably not the first time it ever happened in the world," she said. He still looked down. He thought it probably was. The shameful self sat on his knees like a ventriloquist's dummy. He had it say:

"I promised I'd take care of it, and all. And be responsible. I had to."

"Of course. That's only right."

"And it's over now. I swear it, Alice, it is."

"Don't say that," she said. "You never know."

"No!"

"Well," she said, "there's always room for one more."

"Oh don't."

"I'm sorry."

"I deserve it."

Shyly, not wanting to intrude on his guilt and repentance, she slipped an arm through his and interlaced her fingers with his. After a tormented pause, he did turn to look at her. She smiled. "Dummy," she said. In her eyes brown as bottle-glass he could see himself reflected. One self. What was happening? Under her gaze something wholly unexpected was taking place: a fusing, a knittingtogether of parts that had never been able to stand alone but which all together made up him, "You dummy," she said, and another foetal and incompetent self retreated back within him.

"Alice, listen," he said, and she raised a hand to cover his mouth, almost as if to prevent the escape of what she had put back. "No more," she said. It was astonishing. Once again she had done it to him: as she had first in George Mouse's library so long ago, she had invented him: only this time not out of nothing, as then, but out of falsehoods and figments. He felt a cold flash of horror: what if, in his foolishness, he had gone so far as to lose her? What if he had? What on earth would he have done then? In a rush, before her no-shaking head could stop him, he offered her the rod of correction, offered it without reservation; but she had only asked him for it so that she could, as she then did, give it back to him unused with all her heart.

"Smoky," she said. "Smoky, don't. Listen. About this kid."

"Yes."

"Do you hope it's a boy or a girl?"

"Alice . . . !"

She had always hoped, and almost always believed, that there was a gift they had to give, and that in time—their own time—they would give it. She had even thought that when at last it came, she would recognize it: and she had.


Old World Bird

Like a centrifuge, with infinite slowness accelerating, spring flung them all outward in advancing circles as it advanced, seeming (though how it was possible they couldn't tell) to untangle the tangled skein of them and lay their lives out properly around Edgewood like the coils of a golden necklace: more golden as it grew warmer. Doe, after a long walk one thawing day, described how he had seen the beavers break out of their winter home, two, four, six of them, who had spent months trapped beneath the ice in a room hardly larger than themselves, imagine; and Mother and the rest nodded and groaned as though they knew the feeling well.

On a day when Daily Alice and Sophie were digging happily in the dirt around the back front, as much for the feel of the cool, reborn earth under their nails and in their fingers as for any improvements they might make in the flower beds, they saw a large white bird descend lazily out of the sky, looking at first like a page of wind-borne newspaper or a runaway white umbrella. The bird, which carried a stick in its long red beak, settled on the roof, on a spoked iron mechanism like a cartwheel which was part of the machinery (rusted and forever stopped) of the old orrery. The bird stepped around this place on long red legs. It laid its stick there, cocked its head at it and changed its place; then it looked around itself and began clacking its long red bill together and opening its wings like a fan.

"What is it?"

"I don't know."

"Is it building a nest there?"

"Starting to."

"You know what it looks like?"

"Yes."

"A stork."

"It couldn't be a stork," Doc said when they told him. "Storks are European, or Old World, birds. Never cross the big water." He hurried out with them, and Sophie pointed with her trowel to where there were now two white birds and two more neststicks. The birds were clacking at each other and entwining their necks, like newlyweds unable to stop necking long enough to do housework.

Dr. Drinkwater, after disbelieving his eyes for a long time and making certain with binoculars and reference-works that he wasn't mistaken, that this wasn't a heron of some kind but a true European stork, Ciconia alba, went with great excitement to his study and typed out in triplicate a report of this amazing, this unprecedented sighting to send to the various bird-watching societies he more or less belonged to. He was searching for stamps for these, saying "amazing" under his breath, when he stopped and grew thoughtful. He looked at the memos on his desk. He dropped his search for stamps and sat down slowly, looking upward at the ceiling as though he could see the white birds above him.


Lucy, then Lilac

The stork had indeed come a great distance and from another country, but remembered crossing no big water. The situation here suited her very well, she thought; from the high housetop she could see a great distance, looking with her red-rimmed eyes along the way her beak pointed. She thought she could even see, on clear hot days that brought breezes to ruffle her sun-heated plumage, almost as far as her own long-awaited liberation from this bird-form which for time out of mind she had inhabited. Certainly she once did see as far as to the awakening of the King, who slept and would sleep some time longer within his mountain, his attendants asleep too around him, his red beard grown so long in his long sleep that tendrils of it twisted like ivy around the legs of the feast-table whereon he snored face down. She saw him snuffle, and move, as though tugged at by a dream that might startle him awake: saw this with a leap of her heart, for surely after his awakening, some distance farther on, would come her own liberation.

Unlike some others she could name, though, she would have patience. She would hatch once again from her pebbled eggs a brood of quilly young. She would step with dignity among the weeds of the Lily Pond and slay for their sakes a generation of frogs. She would love her current husband, a dear he was, patient and solicitous, a great help with the children. She would not long: longing was fatal.

And as they all set off on the long and dusty road of that year's summer, Alice was brought to bed. She named her third daughter Lucy, though Smoky thought it was too much like the names of her two others, Tacey and Lily, and he knew that he at least would spend the next twenty or thirty years calling each of them by the others' names. "That's all right," Alice said. "This is the last, anyway." But it wasn't. There was still a boy for her to bear, though even Cloud didn't yet know that.

Anyway, if Generation was the thing they wanted, as Sophie had once perceived as she sat huddled and dreaming by the pavilion on the lake, this was a gratifying year for them: after the equinox came with a frost that left the woods dusty and gray but let summer linger, spectral and SO endless that it summoned distrait crocuses from the ground and called the restless souls of Indians from their burial mounds, Sophie had the child which was attributed to Smoky. Compounding confusion, she named her daughter Lilac, because she dreamed that her mother was coming into her room bearing a great branch of it heavy with odorous blue blooms, and awoke then to see her mother come into her room bearing the newborn girl. Tacey and Lily came too, Tacey carrying carefully her three-monthold sister Lucy to see the baby.

"See, Lucy? See the baby? Just like you."

Lily raised herself up on the bed to peer closely into Lilac's face where she lay nestled now against cooing Sophie. "She won't stay long," she said, after studyihg it.

"Lily!" Mom said. "What a terrible thing to say!"

"Well, she won't." She looked to Tacey: "Will she?"

"Nope.;: Tacey shifted Lucy in her arms. "But it's okay. She'll come back. Seeing her grandmother shocked, she said. Oh, don't worry, she's not going to die or anything. She's just not going to stay."

"And she'll come back," Lily said. "Later."

"Why do you think all that?" Sophie asked, not sure she was yet quite in the world again, or hearing what she thought she heard.

The two girls shrugged, at the same time; the same shrug, in fact, a quick lift of shoulders and eyebrows and back again, as at a simple fact. They watched as Mom, shaking her head, helped Sophie induce pink-and-white Lilac to nurse (a delightful, easefully painful feeling) and with her sucking Sophie fell asleep again, dopey with exhaustion and wonderment, and presently so did Lilac, feeling perhaps the same; and though the cord had been cut which joined them, perhaps they dreamed the same dream.

Next morning the stork left the roof of Edgewood and her messy nest. Her children had already flown without farewell or apology—she expected none—and her husband had gone too, hoping they would meet again next spring. She herself had waited only for Lilac's arrival so that she could bring news of it—she kept her promises—and now she flew off in quite a different direction from her family, following her beak, her fanlike wings cupping the autumn dawn and her legs trailing behind like bannerets.


Little, Big

Striving like the Meadow Mouse to disbelieve in Winter, Smoky gorged himself on the summer sky, lying late into the night on the ground staring upward, though the month had an R in it and Cloud thought it bad for nerve, bone, and tissue. Odd that the changeful constellations, so mindful of the seasons, should be what he chose of summer to memorize, but the turning of the sky was so slow, and seemed so impossible, that it comforted him. Yet he needed only to look at his watch to see that they fled away south even as the geese did.

On the night Orion rose and Scorpio set, a night as warm almost as August for reasons of the weather's own but in fact by that sign the last night of summer, he and Sophie and Daily Alice lay out in a sheep-shorn meadow on their backs, their heads close together like three eggs in a nest, as pale too as that in the night light. They had their heads together so that when one pointed out a star, the arm he pointed with would be more or less in the other's line of sight; otherwise, they would be all night saying That one, there, where I'm pointing, unable to correct for billions of miles of parallax. Smoky had the star-book open on his lap, and consulted it with a flashlight whose light was masked with red cellophane taken from a Dutch cheese so its bightness wouldn't blind him.

"Camelopardalis," he said, pointing to a dangling necklace in the north, not clear because the horizon's light still diluted it. "That is, the Camelopard."

"And what," Daily Alice asked indulgently, "is a camelopard?"

"A giraffe, in fact," Smoky said. "A camel-leopard. A camel with leopard's spots."

"Why is there a giraffe in heaven?" Sophie asked. "How did it get there?"

"I bet you're not the first to ask that," Smoky said, laughing. "Imagine their surprise when they first looked up over there and said, My God, what's that giraffe doing up there?"

The menagerie of heaven, racing as from a zoo breakout through the lives of the men and women, gods and heroes; the band of the Zodiac (that night all their birth-signs were invisible, bearing the sun around the south); the impossible dust of the Milky Way rainbow-wise overarching them; Orion lifting one racing foot over the horizon, following his dog Sirius. They discovered the moment's rising sign. Jupiter burned unwinking in the west. The whole spangled beach-umbrella, fringed with the Tropics, revolved on its bent staff around the North Star, too slowly to be seen, yet steadily.

Smoky, out of his childhood reading, related the interlocking tales told above them. The pictures were so formless and incomplete, and the tales, some at least, so trivial that it seemed to Smoky that it must all be true: Hercules looked so little like himself that the only way anyone could have found him was if he'd got the news about Hercules being up there, and was told where to look. As one tree traces its family back to Daphne but another has to be mere commoner; as only the odd flower, mountain, fact gets to have divine ancestry, so Cassiopeia of all people is brilliantly asterized, or her chair rather, as though by accident; and somebody else's crown, and another's lyre: the attic of the gods.

What Sophie wondered, who couldn't make the patterned floor of heaven come out in pictures but lay hypnotized by their nearness, was how it could be that some in heaven were there for reward, and others condemned to it; while still others were there it seemed only to play parts in the dramas of others. It seemed unfair; and yet she couldn't decide whether it was unfair because there they were, stuck forever, who hadn't deserved it; or unfair because, without having earned it, they had been saved—enthroned—need not die. She thought of their own tale, they three, permanent as a constellation, strange enough to be remembered forever.

The earth that week was making progress through the discarded tail of a long-passed comet, and each night a rain of fragments entered the air and flamed whitely as they burned up. "No bigger than pebbles or pinheads some of them," Smoky said. "It's the air you see lit up."

But this now Sophie could see clearly: these were falling stars. She thought perhaps she could pick one out and watch and see it fall: a momentary bright exhalation, that made her draw breath, her heart filled with infinitude. Would that be a better fate? In the grass her hand found Smoky's; the other already held her sister's, who pressed it every time brightness fell from the air.

Daily Alice couldn't tell if she felt huge or small. She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit within the compass of her human head. She alternated between these feelings, expanding and diminishing. The stars wandered in and out of the vast portals of her eyes, under the immense empty dome of her brow; and then Smoky took her hand and she vanished to a speck, still holding the stars as in a tiny jewel box within her.

So they lay a long time, not caring to talk any more, each dwelling on that odd, physical sensation of ephemeral eternity—a paradox but undeniably felt; and if the stars had been as near and full of faces as they seemed, they would have looked down and seen those three as a single asterism, a linked wheel against the wheeling dark sky of the meadow.


Solstice Night

There was no entrance but a tiny hole at the window corner where the solstice-midnight wind blew in, piling dust on the sill in a little furrow: but that was room enough for them, and they entered there.

There were three then in Sophie's bedroom standing close together, their brown-capped heads consulting, their pale flat faces like little moons.

"See how she sleeps away."

"Yes, and the babe asleep in her arms."

"My, she holds it tight."

"Not so tight."

As one, they drew closer to the tall-bed. Lilac in her mother's arms, in a hooded bunting against the cold, breathed on Sophie's cheek; a drop of wetness was there.

"Well, take it, then."

"Why don't you if you're so anxious."

"Let's all."

Six long white hands went out toward Lilac. "Wait," said one. "Who has the other?"

"You were to bring it."

"Not I."

"Here it is, here." A thing was unfolded from a drawstring bag.

"My. Not very like, is it."

"What's to be done?"

"Breathe on it."

The breathed on it in turns as they held it amidst them. Now and again one looked back at sleeping Lilac. They breathed till the thing amid them was a second Lilac.

"That'll do."

"It's very like."

"Now take the . . ."

"Wait again." One looked closely at Lilac, drawing back ever so slightly the coverlet. "Look here. She has her little hands tight wound up in her mother's hair."

"Holding fast."

"Take the child, we'll wake the mother."

"These, then." One had drawn out great scissors, which gleamed whitely in the night-light and opened with a faint snicker. "As good as done."

One holding the false Lilac (not asleep but with vacant eyes and unmoving; a night in its mother's arms would cure that) and one reaching ready to take away Sophie's Lilac, and the third with the shears, it was all quickly done; neither mother nor child awoke; they nestled what they had brought by Sophie's breast.

"Now to be gone."

"Easily said. Not the way we came."

"Down the stairs and out their way."

"If we must."

Moving as one and without sound (the old house seemed now and again to draw breath or groan at their passing, but then it always did so, for reasons of its own) they gained the front door, and one reached up and opened it, and they were outside and going quickly with a favorable wind. Lilac never waked or made a sound (the wisps and locks of gold hair still held in her fists blew away in the quick wind of their passage) and Sophie slept too, having felt nothing; except the long tale of her dream had altered, at a turning, and become sad and difficult in ways she hadn't known before.


In All Directions

Smoky was wrenched awake by some internal motion; as soon as his eyes were wide open, he forgot whatever it was that had awakened him. But he was awake, as awake as if it were midday, irritating state, he wondered if it was something he ate. The hour was useless four o'clock in the morning. He shut his eyes resolutely for a while, unconvinced that sleep could have deserted him so completely. But it had; he could tell because the more he watched the eggs of color break and run on the screen of his eyelids the less soporific they became, the more pointless and uninteresting.

Very carefully he slipped out from under the high-piled covers, and felt in the darkness for his robe. There was only one cure he knew of for this state, and that was to get up and act awake until it was placated and went away. He stepped carefully over the floor, hoping he wouldn't step into shoes or other impedimenta, there was no reason to inflict this state on Daily Alice, and he gained the door, satisfied he hadn't disturbed her or the night at all. He'd just walk the halls, go downstairs and turn on some lights, that should do it. He closed the door carefully behind him, and at that Daily Alice awoke, not because of any noise he'd made but because the whole peace of her sleep had been subtly broken and invaded by his absence.

There was already a light burning in the kitchen when he opened the back-stairs door. Great-aunt Cloud made a low, shuddering sound of startled horror when she saw the door open, and then "Oh," she said, when only Smoky looked around it. She had a glass of warm milk before her, and her hair was down, long and fine and spreading, white as Hecate's; it had been uncut for years and years.

"You gave me a start," she said.

They discussed sleeplessness in low voices, though there was no one their voices could disturb from here but the mice. Smoky, seeing she too wanted to bustle some to overcome wakefulness, allowed her to warm milk for him; to his he added a stiff measure of brandy.

"Listen to that wind," said Cloud.

Above them, they heard the long gargle and whisper of a flushed toilet. "What's up?" Cloud said. "A sleepless night, and no moon." She shivered. "It feels like the night of a catastrophe, or a night big news comes, everybody awake. Well. Just chance." She said it as another might say God help us—with that same degree of rote unbelief.

Smoky, warmed now, rose and said "Well," in a resigned sort of way. Cloud had begun to leaf through a cookbook there. He hoped she wouldn't have to sit to watch bleak dawn come; he hoped he wouldn't himself.

At the top of the stairs he didn't turn toward his own bed where, he knew, sleep didn't yet await him. He turned toward Sophie's room, with no intention but to look at her a while. Her restfulness calmed him sometimes, as a cat's can, made him restful too. When he opened her door, he saw by the moon-pale night-light that someone sat on the edge of Sophie's bed.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi," said Daily Alice.

There was an odd smell in the air, a smell like leaf mold, or Queen Anne's-lace, or perhaps the earth under an upturned stone. "What's up?" he asked softly. He came to sit on the other side of the bed.

"I don't know," she said. "Nothing. I woke up when you left. I felt like something happened to Sophie, so I came to see."

There was no danger that their quiet talk would waken Sophie; people talking near her in her sleep only seemed to comfort her, to make her deep draughts of breath more regular.

"Everything's all right, though," he said.

"Yes."

Wind pressed on the house, beating it in fitful anger; the window boomed. He looked down at Sophie and Lilac. Lilac looked quite dead, but after three children Smoky knew that this scary appearance, especially in the dark, wasn't reason for alarm.

They sat silent on either side of Sophie. The wind spoke suddenly a single word in the chimney's throat. Smoky looked at Alice, who touched his arm and smiled quickly.

What smile did it remind him of?

"Everything's okay," she said.

He remembered Great-aunt Cloud smiling at him as they sat troubled on the lawn of Auberon's summer house the day he was married: a smile meant to be comforting, but which was not. A smile against distance, that only seemed to increase distance. A signal of friendship sent out of infrangible foreignness; a hand waved far off, from across a border.

"Do you smell a funny smell?" he said.

"Yes. No. I did. It's gone now."

It was. The room was full only of night air. The sea of wind outside raised small currents in it which now and again brushed his face; but it didn't seem to him as though this were Brother North-wind moving around them, but as though the many-angled house itself were under sail, making progress through the night, plowing steadily into the future in all directions.