Little, Big

On a certain day in June, 19**, a young man was making his way on foot northward from the great City to a town or place called Edgewood, that he had been told of but had never visited. His name was Smoky Barnable, and he was going to Edgewood to get married; the fact that he walked and didn’t ride was one of the conditions placed on his coming there at all.

Somewhere to Elsewhere

Though he had left his City room early in the morning it was nearly noon before he had crossed the huge bridge on a little-used walkway and come out into the named but boundaryless towns on the north side or the river. Through the afternoon he negotiated those Indian-named places, usually unable to take the straight route commanded by the imperious and constant flow of traffic; he went neighborhood by neighborhood, looking down alleys and into stores. He saw few walkers, even indigenous, though there were kids on bikes; he wondered about their lives in these places, which to him seemed gloomily peripheral, though the kids were cheerful enough.

The regular blocks of commercial avenues and residential streets began gradually to become disordered, thinning like the extremes of a great forest; began to be broken by weedy lots as though by glades; now and then a dusty undergrown woods or a scruffy meadow announced that it was available to be turned into an industrial park. Smoky turned that phrase over in his mind, since that seemed truly the place in the world where he was, the industrial park, between the desert and the sown.

He stopped at a bench where people could catch buses from Somewhere to Elsewhere. He sat, shrugged his small pack from his back, took from it a sandwich he had made himself—another condition—and a confetti-colored gas-station road map. He wasn’t sure if the map were forbidden by the conditions, but the directions he’d been given to get to Edgewood weren’t explicit, and he opened it.

Now. This blue line was apparently the cracked macadam lined with untenanted brick factories he had been walking along. He turned the map so that this line ran parallel to his bench, as the road did (he wasn’t much of a map reader) and found, far off to his left, the place he walked toward. The name Edgewood didn’t appear, actually, but it was here somewhere, in this group of five towns marked with the legend’s most insignificant bullets. So. There was a mighty double red line that went near there, proud with exits and entrances; he couldn’t walk along that. A thick blue line (on the model of the vascular system, Smoky imagined all the traffic flowing south to the city on the blue lines, away on the red) ran somewhat nearer, extending corpuscular access to towns and townlets along the way. The much thinner sclerotic blue line he sat beside was tributary to this; probably commerce had moved there, Tool Town, Food City, Furniture World, Carpet Village. Well… But there was also, almost indistinguishable, a narrow black line he could take soon instead. He thought at first that it led nowhere, but no, it went on, faltering, seeming at first almost forgotten by the mapmaker in the ganglia, but then growing clearer in the northward emptiness, and coming very near a town Smoky knew to be near Edgewood.

That one, then. It seemed a walker’s road.

After measuring with his thumb and finger the distance on the map he had come, and how far he had to go (much farther), he slung on his pack, tilted his hat against the sun, and went on.

A Long Drink of Water

She was not much in his mind as he walked, though for sure she hadn’t been far from it often in the last nearly two years he had loved her; the room he had met her in was one he looked into with the mind’s eye often, sometimes with the trepidation he had felt then, but often nowadays with a grateful happiness; looked in to see George Mouse showing him from afar a glass, a pipe, and his two tall cousins: she, and her shy sister behind her.

It was in the Mouse townhouse, last tenanted house on the block, in the library on the third floor, the one whose mullioned windows were patched with cardboard and whose dark rug was worn white in pathways between door, bar and windows. It was that very room.

She was tall.

She was nearly six feet tall, which was several inches taller than Smoky; her sister, just turned fourteen, was as tall as he, Their party dresses were short, and glittered, hers red, her sister’s white; their long, long stockings glistened. What was odd was that tall as they were they were shy, especially the younger, who smiled but wouldn’t take Smoky’s hand, only turned away further behind her sister.

Delicate giantesses. The older glanced toward George as he made debonair introductions. Her smile was tentative. Her hair was red-gold and curly-fine. Her name, George said, was Daily Alice.

He took her hand, looking up. “A long drink of water,” he said, and she began to laugh. Her sister laughed too, and George Mouse bent down and slapped his knee. Smoky, not knowing why the old chestnut should be so funny, looked from one to another with a seraphic idiot’s grin, his hand unrelinquished.

It was the happiest moment of his life.

Anonymity

It had not been, until he met Daily Alice Drinkwater in the library of the Mouse townhouse, a life particularly charged with happiness; but it happened to be a life suited just right for the courtship he then set out on. He was the only child of his father’s second marriage, and was born when his father was nearly sixty. When his mother realized that the solid Barnable fortune had largely evanesced under his father’s management, and that there had been therefore little reason to marry him and less to bear him a child, she left him in an access of bitterness. That was too bad for Smoky, because of all his relations she was the least anonymous; in fact she was the only one of any related to him by blood whose face he could instantly bring to memory in his old age, though he had been a boy when she left. Smoky himself mostly inherited the Barnable anonymity, and only a streak of his mother’s concreteness: an actual streak it seemed to those who knew him, a streak of presence surrounded by a dim glow of absence.

They were a large family. His father had five sons and daughter by his first wife; they all lived in anonymous suburbs of cities in those states whose names begin with an I and which Smoky’s City friends couldn’t distinguish from one another. Smoky confused the catalogue himself at times. Since his father was supposed by them to have a lot of money and it was never clear what he intended to do with it, Dad was always welcome in their houses, and after his wife’s departure he chose to sell the house Smoky was born in and travel from one to another with his young son, a succession of anonymous dogs, and seven custom-made chests containing his library. Barnable was an educated man, though his learning was of such a remote and rigid kind that it gave him no conversation and didn’t reduce his natural anonymity at all. His older sons and daughters regarded the chests of books as an inconvenience, like having his socks confused in the wash with theirs.

(Later on, it was Smoky’s habit to try to sort out his half-siblings and their houses and assign them to their proper cities and states while he sat on the toilet. Maybe that was because it was in their toilets that he had felt most anonymous, anonymous to the point of invisibility; anyway, he would pass the time there shuffling his brothers and sisters and their children like a pack of cards, trying to match faces to porches to lawns, until late in life he could deal out the whole of it. It gave him the same bleak satisfaction he got from solving crossword puzzles, and the same doubt—what if he had guessed words that crossed correctly, but weren’t the words the maker had in mind? The next-week’s paper with the solution printed would never arrive.)

His wife’s desertion didn’t make Barnable less cheerful, only more anonymous; it seemed to his older children, as he coalesced in and then evaporated from their lives, that he existed less and less. It was only to Smoky that he gave the gift of his private solidity: his learning. Because the two of them moved so often, Smoky never did go to a regular school; and by the time one of the states that began with an I found out what had been done to Smoky by his father all those years, he was too old to be compelled to go to school any more. So, at sixteen, Smoky knew Latin, classical and medieval; Greek; some old-fashioned mathematics; and he could play the violin a little. He had smelled few books other than his father’s leather-bound classics; he could recite two hundred lines of Virgil more or less accurately; and he wrote in a perfect Chancery hand.

His father died in that year, shriveled it seemed by the imparting of all that was thick in him to his son. Smoky continued their wanderings for a few more years. He had a hard time getting work because he had no Diploma; at last he learned to type in a shabby business school, in South Bend he later thought it must have been, and became a Clerk. He lived a lot in three different suburbs with the same name in three different cities, and in each his relatives called him by a different name—his own, his father’s, and Smoky—which last so suited his evanescence that he kept it. When he was twenty-one, an unknown thrift of his father’s threw down some belated money on him, and he took a bus to the City, forgetting as soon as he was past the last one all the cities his relatives had lived in, and all his relatives too, so that long afterwards he had to reconstruct them face by lawn; and once arrived in the City, he dispersed utterly and gratefully in it like a raindrop fallen into the sea.

Name & Number

He had a room in a building that had once been the rectory of the very old church that stood revered and vandalized behind it. From his window he could see the churchyard where men with Dutch names turned comfortably in their old beds. In the morning he got up by the clock of sudden traffic—which he could never learn to sleep through as he had the long thunder of Midwestern trains—and went to work.

He worked in a wide, white room where the little sounds he and the others made would rise to the ceiling and descend again strangely altered; when someone coughed, it was as though the ceiling itself coughed, apologetically, with covered mouth. All day long there Smoky slid a magnifying bar down column after column after column of tiny print, scrutinizing each name and its attendant address and phone number, and marking red symbols next to those that were not the same as the name and address and phone number typed on each card of stack after stack of cards that were piled daily next to him.

At first the names he read were meaningless to him, as deeply anonymous as their phone numbers. The only distinction a name had was its accidental yet ineluctable place in the alphabetical order, and then whatever idiot errors the computer could dress it in, which Smoky was paid to discover. (That the computer could make as few errors as it did impressed Smoky less than its bizarre witlessness; it couldn’t distinguish, for instance, when the abbreviation “St.” meant “street” and when it meant “saint,” and directed to expand these abbreviations, would without a smile produce the Seventh Saint Bar and Grill and the Church of All Streets.) As the weeks fell away, though, and Smoky filled up his aimless evenings walking block after block of the City (not knowing that most people stayed inside after dark) and began to learn the neighborhoods and their boundaries and classes and bars and stoops, the names that looked up at him through the glass bar began to grow faces, ages, attitudes; the people he saw in buses and trains and candy stores, the people who shouted to each other across tenement shaftways and stood gaping at traffic accidents and argued with waiters and shopgirls, and the waiters and shopgirls too, began to mill through his flimsy pages; the Book began to seem like a great epic of the City’s life, with all its comings and goings, tragedies and farces, changeful and full of drama. He found widowed ladies with ancient Dutch names who lived he knew in high-windowed buildings on great avenues, whose husbands, Estates of, they managed, and whose sons had names like Steele and Eric and were intr dcrtrs and lived in Bohemian neighborhoods; he read of a huge family with wild Greeksounding names who lived in several buildings on a noisome block he had walked once, a family that grew and discarded members every time he passed them in the alphabet—Gypsies, he decided at last; he knew of men whose wives and teenage daughters had private phones (on which they cooed with their lovers) while their men made calls on the many phones of the financial firms that bore their names; he grew suspicious of men who used their first initials and middle names because he found them all to be bill collectors, or lawyers whose bsns had the same address as their rsdnce, or city marshals who also sold used furniture; he learned that almost everyone named Singleton and everyone named Singletary lived in the northern black city where the men had for first names the names of past presidents and the women had gemlike names, pearl and ruby and opal and jewel, with a proud Mrs. before it—he imagined them large and dark and glowing in small apartments, alone with many clean children. From the proud locksmith who used so many A’s in his tiny shop’s name that he came first to Archimedes Zzzyandottie who came last (an old scholar who lived alone, reading Greek newspapers in a shabby apartment) he knew them all. Beneath his sliding bar a tiny name and number would rise up like flotsam borne up a beach by waves and tell its story; Smoky listened, looked at his card, found them the same, and was turning down the card even as the distorting glass threw up the next tale. The reader next to him sighed tragically. The ceiling coughed. The ceiling laughed, loudly. Everyone looked up.

A young man who had just been hired had laughed.

“I’ve just found,” he said, “a listing here for the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club.” He could barely finish it for laughing, and Smoky was amazed that the silence of every other proofreader there didn’t hush him. “Don’t you get it?” The young man appealed to Smoky. “It sure would be a noisy bridge.” Smoky suddenly laughed too, and their laughter rose to the ceiling and shook hands there.

His name was George Mouse; he wore wide suspenders to his wide pants, and when the day was done, he threw around himself a great woolen cloak whose collar trapped his long black hair, so that he must reach back and flip it out, like a girl. He had a hat like Svengali’s, and eyes like him too—dark-shadowed, compelling, and humorous. It wasn’t a week later that he was fired, to the relief of every pair of bifocals in the white room, but by then he and Smoky had become, as only Smoky in the whole world it seemed could any longer say with all seriousness, fast friends.

A City Mouse

With George as his friend, Smoky began a course of mild debauchery, a little drink, a little drugs; George changed his clothes, and his patterns of speech, to a City tattersall, and introduced him to Girls. In not too long a while, Smoky’s anonymity became clothed, like the Invisible Man in his bandages; people stopped bumping into him on the street or sitting on his lap in buses without apology—which he had attributed to his being very vaguely present to most people.

To the Mouse family—who lived in the last tenanted building of a block of buildings the first City Mouse had built and which they still mostly owned—he was at least present; and more than for his new hat and his new lingo he thanked George for that family of highly distinguishable and loudly loving folk. In the midst of their arguments, jokes, parties, walkings-out-in-bedroom-slippers, attempts at suicide and noisy reconciliations, he sat unnoticed for hours; hut then Uncle Ray or Franz or Mom would look up startled and say, “Smoky’s here!” and he would smile.

“Do you have country cousins?” Smoky asked George once as they waited out a snowstorm over café-royale in George’s favorite old hotel bar. And indeed he did.

At First Sight

“They’re very religious,” George told him with a wink as he led him away from the giggly girls to introduce him to their parents, Dr. and Mrs. Drinkwater.

“Not a practicing doctor,” said the Doctor, a wrinkled man with woolly hair and the unsmiling cheerfulness of a small animal. He was not as tall as his wife, whose generously-fringed and silken shawl trembled as she shook Smoky’s hand and asked him to call her Sophie; she in turn wasn’t as tall as her daughters. “All the Dales were tall,” she said, looking up and inward as though she could see them all somewhere above her. She had given her surname therefore to her two great daughters, Alice Dale and Sophie Dale Drinkwater; but Mother was the only one who ever used the names, except that as a child Alice Dale had been called by some other child Daily Alice and the name had stuck, so now it was Daily Alice and plain Sophie, and there was nothing for it, except that anyone looking at them could certainly see that they were Dale; and they all turned to look at them.

Whatever religion it was that they practiced didn’t prevent them from sharing a pipe with Franz Mouse, who sat at their feet since they two took up all of a small divan; or from taking the rum-punch Mom offered them; or from laughing behind their hands, more at what they whispered to each other than at anything silly Franz said; or showing, when they crossed their legs, long thighs beneath their spangled dresses.

Smoky went on looking. Even though George Mouse had taught him to be a City man and not afraid of women, a lifetime’s habit wasn’t so easily overcome, and he went on looking; and only after a decent interval of being paralyzed with uncertainty did he force himself to walk the rug to where they sat. Eager not to be a wet blanket—“Don’t be a wet blanket, for God’s sake,” George was always telling him—he sat down on the floor by them, a fixed smile on his face and a bearing that made him look (and he was, he was stunned to feel as Daily Alice turned to look at him, visible to her) oddly breakable. He had a habit of twiddling his glass between thumb and forefinger so that the ice trembled rapidly and chilled the drink. He did it now, and the ice rattled in the glass like a bell rung ftr attention. A silence fell.

“Do you come here often?” he said.

“No,” she said evenly. “Not to the City. Only once in a while, when Daddy has business, or… other things.”

“He’s a doctor.”

“Not really. Not any more. He’s a writer.” She was smiling, and Sophie beside her was giggling again, and Daily Alice went on with the conversation as though the object were to see how long she could keep a straight face. “He writes animal stories, for children.”

“Oh.”

“He writes one a day.”

He looked up into her laughing eyes clear and brown as bottle glass. He had begun to feel very odd. “They must not be very long,” he said, swallowing.

What was happening? He was in love, of course, at first sight, but he had been in love before and it had always been at first sight and he had never felt like this—as though something were growing, inexorably, within him.

“He writes under the name of Saunders,” Daily Alice said.

He pretended to search his memory for this name, but in fact he was searching within for what it was that made him feel so funny. It had extended now outward to his hands; he examined them where they lay in his houndstooth lap, looking very weighty. He interlaced the ponderous fingers.

“Remarkable,” he said, and the two girls laughed, and Smoky laughed too. The feeling made him want to laugh. It couldn’t be the smoke; that always made him feel weightless and transparent. This was the opposite. The more he looked at her the stronger it grew, the more she looked at him the more he felt… what? In a moment of silence they simply looked at each other, and understanding hummed, thundered within Smoky as he realized what had happened: not only had he fallen in love with her, and at first sight, but she at first sight had fallen in love with him, and the two circumstances had this effect: his anonymity was being cured. Not disguised, as George Mouse had tried to do, but cured, from the inside out. That was the feeling. It was as though she stirred him with cornstarch. He had begun to thicken.

The Young Santa Claus

He had gone down the narrow back stairs to the only john in the house that still worked, and stood looking into the wide, black-flecked mirror of that stone place.

Well. Who would have thought it. From the mirror a face looked out at him, not unfamiliar really, but still as though seen for the first time. A round and open face, a face that looked like the young Santa Claus as we might see him in early photographs: a little grave, dark-moustached, with a round nose and lines by the eyes already where little laughing birds had walked though he wasn’t yet twenty-three. All in all, a face of sunny disposition, with something in the eyes still blank and unresolved, pale and missing, that would, he supposed, never fill in. It was enough. In fact it was miraculous. He nodded, smiling, at his new acquaintance, and glanced at him again over his shoulder as he left.

As he was going up the back stairs, he met Daily Alice coming down, suddenly, at a turning. Now there was no idiot grin on his face; now she wasn’t giggling. They slowed as they approached each other; when she had squeezed past him she didn’t go on but turned to look back at him; Smoky was a step higher than she, so that their heads were in the relation dictated by movie kisses. His heart pounding with fear and elation, and his head humming with the fierce certainty of a sure thing, he kissed her. She responded as though for her too a certainty had proved out, and in the midst of her hair and lips and long arms encircling him, Smoky added a treasure of great price to the small store of his wisdom.

There was a noise then on the stair above them and they started. It was Sophie, and she stood above them eyes wide, biting her lip. “I have to pee-pee,” she said, and danced by them lightly.

“You’ll be leaving soon,” Smoky said.

“Tonight.”

“When will you come back?”

“I don’t know.”

He held her again; the second embrace was calm and sure. “I was frightened,” she said. “I know,” he said, exulting. God she was big. How was he to handle her when there was no stair to stand on?

A Sea Island

As a man well might who had grown up anonymous, Smoky had always thought that women choose or do not choose men by criteria he knew nothing of, by caprice, like monarchs, by taste, like critics; he had always assumed that a woman’s choice of him or of another was foregone, ineluctable and instant. So he waited on them, like a courtier, waited to he noticed. Turns out, he thought, standing late that night on the Mouse stoop, turns out not so; they—she anyway—is flushed with the same heats and doubts, is like me shy and overcome by desire, and her heart raced like mine when the embrace was at hand, I know it did.

He stood for a long time on the stoop, turning over this jewel of knowledge, and sniffing the wind which had turned, as it infrequently does in the City, and blew in from the ocean. He could smell tide, and shore and sea detritus, sour and salt and bittersweet. And realized that the great City was after all a sea island, and a small one at that.

A sea island. And you could forget so basic a fact for years at a time if you lived here. But there it was, amazing but true. He stepped off the stoop and down the street, solid as a statue from breast to back, his footsteps ringing on the pavement.

Correspondence

Her address was “Edgewood, that’s all,” George Mouse said, and they had no phone; and so because he had no choice, Smoky sat down to make love through the mails with a thoroughness just about vanished from the world. His thick letters were consigned to this Edgewood place, and he waited for reply until he couldn’t wait anymore and wrote another, and so their letters crossed in the mail as all true lovers’ letters do; and she saved them and tied them with a lavender ribbon, and years later her grandchildren found them and read of those old people’s improbable passion.

“I found a park,” he wrote, in his black, spiky goblin’s hand; “there’s a plaque on the pillar where you enter it that says Mouse Drinkwater Stone 1900. Is that you all? It has a little pavilion of the Seasons, and statues, and all the walks curve so that you can’t walk straight into the middle. You walk and walk and find yourself coming back out. Summer’s very old there (you don’t notice, in the city, except in parks), it’s whiskery and dusty, and the park is little, too; but it all reminded me of you,” as if everything did not. “I found an old pile of newspapers,” said her letter which crossed his (the two truckdrivers waving to each other from their tall blue cabs on the misty morning turnpike). “There were these comic strips about a boy who dreams. The comic strip is all his dream, his Dreamland. Dreamland is beautiful; palaces and processions are always folding up and shrinking away, or growing huge and out of hand, or when you look closely turn out to be something else—you know—just like real dreams, only always pretty. Great-aunt Cloud says she saved them because the man who drew them, his name was Stone, once was an architect in the City, with George’s great-grandfather and mine! They were ‘Beaux-Arts’ architects. Dreamland is very ‘Beaux-Arts’. Stone was a drunkard—that’s the word Cloud uses. The boy in the dreams always looks sleepy and surprised at the same time. He reminds me of you.”

After beginning thus timidly, their letters eventually became so face-to-face that when at last they met again, in the bar of the old hotel (outside whose leaded windows snow fell) they both wondered if there had been some mistake, if Somehow they had sent all those letters to the wrong person, this person, this unflcused and nervous stranger. That passed in an instant, but for a while they had to take turns speaking at some length, because it was the only way they knew; the snow turned to blizzard, the cafe-royale turned cold; a phrase of hers fell in with one of his and one of his with one of hers and, as elated as if they were the first to discover the trick of it, they conversed.

“You don’t get—well—bored up there, all alone all the time?” Smoky asked, when they had practiced a while.

“Bored?” She was surprised. It seemed like an idea that hadn’t before occurred to her. “No. And we’re not alone.”

“Well, I didn’t mean… What sort of people are they?”

“What people?”

“The people… you’re not alone with.”

“Oh. Well. There used to be a lot of farmers. It was Scotch immigrants at first there. MacDonald, MacGregor, Brown. There aren’t so many farms now. But some. A lot of people up there now are our relatives, too, sort of. You know how it is.”

He didn’t, exactly. A silence fell, and rose as they both started to speak at once, and fell again. Smoky said: “It’s a big house?”

She smiled. “Enormous.” Her brown eyes were deliquescent in the lamplight. “You’ll like it. Everybody does. Even George, but he says he doesn’t.”

“Why?”

“He’s always getting lost there.”

Smoky smiled to think of George, the pathfinder, the waymaker through sinister night streets, baffled in an ordinary house. He tried to remember if in a letter he’d used the joke about city mice and country mice. She said: “Can I tell you something?”

“Sure.” His heart beat fast, with no reason to.

“I knew you, when we met.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I recognized you.” She lowered her furry red-gold lashes, then stole a quick look at him, then looked around the somnolent bar as though someone might overhear her. “I’d been told about you.”

“By George.”

“No, no. A long time ago. When I was a kid.”

“About me?”

“Well not about you exactly. Or about you exactly but I didn’t know that till I met you.” On the plaid tablecloth, she cupped her elbows in her hands, and leaned forward. “I was nine; or ten. It had been raining for a long time. Then there was a morning when I was walking Spark in the Park—”

“What?”

“Spark was a dog we had. The Park is, you know, the grounds around. There was a breeze blowing, and it felt like the rain was going to end. We were all wet. Then I looked west: there was a rainbow. I remembered what my mother said: morning rainbow in the west, then the weather will be best.”

He imagined her very vividly, in a yellow slicker and high widemouthed boots, and her hair finer even and curlier than now; and wondered how she knew which way west was, a problem he still sometimes stumbled over.

“It was a rainbow, but bright, and it looked like it came down just—there, you know, not far; I could see the grass, all sparkling and stained every color there. The sky had got big, you know, the way it does when it clears at last after a long rainy time, and everything looked near; the place the rainbow came down was near; and I wanted more than anything to go stand in it—and look up—and be covered with colors.”

Smoky laughed. “That’s hard,” he said.

She laughed too, dipping her head and raising the back of her hand to her mouth in a way that already seemed heartstirringly familiar to him. “It sure is,” she said. “It seemed to take forever.”

“You mean you—”

“Every time you thought you were coming close, it would be just as far off, in a different place; and if you came to that place, it would be in the place you came from; and my throat was sore with running, and not getting any closer. But you know what you do then—”

“Walk away from it,” he said, surprised at his own voice but Somehow sure this was the answer.

“Sure. That isn’t as easy as it sounds, but—”

“No, I don’t suppose.” He had stopped laughing.

“—but if you do it right—”

“No, wait,” he said.

“—just right, then…”

“They don’t really come down, now,” Smoky said. “They don’t, not really.”

“They don’t here,” she said. “Now listen. I followed Spark; I let him choose, because he didn’t care, and I did. It took just one step, and turn around, and guess what.”

“I can’t guess. You were covered in colors.”

“No. It’s not like that. Outside, you see colors inside it; so, inside it—”

“You see colors outside it.”

“Yes. The whole world colored, as though it were made of candy—no, like it was made of a rainbow. A whole colored world as soft as light all around as far as you can see. You want to run and explore it. But you don’t dare take a step, because it might be the wrong step—so you only look, and look. And you think: Here I am at last.” She had fallen into thought. “At last,” she said again softly.

“How,” he said, and swallowed, and began again. “How did I come into it? You said someone told you…”

“Spark,” she said. “Or someone like him.”

She looked closely at him, and he tried to compose his features into a semblance of pleasant attention. “Spark is the dog,” he said.

“Yes.” She had become reluctant, it seemed, to go on. She picked up her spoon and studied herself, tiny and upside down, in its concavity, and put it down. “Or someone like him. Well. It’s not important.”

“Wait,” he said.

“It only lasted a minute. While we stood there, I thought—” guardedly, and not looking at him “—I thought Spark said…” She looked up at him. “Is this hard to believe?”

“Well, yes. It is. Hard to believe.”

“I didn’t think it would be. Not for you.”

“Why not for me?”

“Because,” she said, and cradled her cheek in her hand, her face sad, disappointed even, which silenced him utterly, “because you were the one Spark talked about.”

Make-Believe

It was probably only because he had nothing at all left to say, that in that moment—or rather in the moment after that moment—a difficult question or delicate proposition which Smoky had been mulling over all day tumbled out of his mouth in a far from finished ftrm.

“Yes,” she said, not raising her cheek from her hand but with a new smile lighting her face like a morning rainbow in the west. And so when the false dawn of the City’s lights showed them the snow piled deep and crisp and even on their window-ledge, they lay with the deep crisp bedclothes up around their necks (the hotel’s heat had failed in the sudden cold) and talked. They hadn’t yet slept.

“What,” he said, “are you talking about?”

She laughed and curled her toes against him. He felt strange, giddy, in a certain way he hadn’t felt since before puberty, which was odd, but there it was: that feeling of being filled up so full that the tips of his fingers and the top of his head tingled: shone, maybe, if he were to look at them. Anything was possible. “It’s make-believe, isn’t it,” he said, and she turned over smiling and fitted their bodies together like a double s.

Make-believe. When he was a kid, when he and others found some buried thing—neck of a brown bottle, tarnished spoon, a stone even that bore half an ancient spike-hole—they could convince themselves it was of great age. It had been there when George Washington was alive. Earlier. It was venerable, and immensely valuable. They convinced themselves of this by a collective act of will, which at the same time they concealed from each other: like make-believe, but different.

“But see?” she said. “It was all meant to be. And I knew it.”

“But why?” he said, delighted, in torment; “why are you so sure?”

“Because it’s a Tale. And Tales work out.”

“But I don’t know it’s a tale.”

“People in tales don’t know, always. But there they are.”

One winter night when he was a boy, boarding then with a half-brother who was half-heartedly religious, he first saw a ring around the moon. He stared up at it, immense, icy, half as wide as the night sky, and grew certain that it could only mean the End of the World. He waited thrilled in that suburban yard for the still night to break apart in apocalypse, all the while knowing in his heart that it would not: that there is nothing in this world not proper to it and that it contains no such surprises. That night he dreamt of Heaven: Heaven was a dark amusement park, small and joyless, just an iron Ferris wheel turning in eternity and a glum arcade to amuse the faithful. He awoke relieved, and never after believed his prayers, though he had said them for his brother without rancor. He would say hers, if she asked him to, and gladly; but she said none, that he knew of; she asked instead assent to something, something so odd, so unencompassable by the common world he had always lived in, so—he laughed, amazed. “A fairy tale,” he said.

“I guess,” she said sleepily. She reached behind her for his hand, and drew it around her. “I guess, if you want.”

He knew he would have to believe in order to go where she had been; knew that, if he believed, he could go there even if it didn’t exist, if it was make-believe. He moved the hand she had drawn around her down her long flesh, and with a little sound she pressed herself against him. He searched himself for that old will, long in disuse. If she went there, ever, he didn’t want to be left behind; wanted never to be farther from her than this.

Life is Short or Long

In May at Edgewood Daily Alice in the dark of the woods sat on a shining rock that jutted out over a deep pool, a pool made by the fall of water down a cleft in high rock walls. The stream that hurtled ceaselessly through the cleft to plunge into the pool made a speech as it did so, a speech repetitive yet always full of interest; Daily Alice listened, though she had heard it all before. She looked a lot like the girl on the soda bottle, though not so delicate and lacking wings.

“Grandfather Trout,” she said to the pool, and again: “Grandfather Trout.” She waited then, and when nothing came of this, took up two small stones and plunged them into the water (cold and silky as only falling water held in stone pools seems to be) and knocked them together, which within the water made a sound like distant guns and hung longer than sounds hang in air. Then there swam out from somewhere in the weed-bearded hidey-holes along the bank a great white trout, an albino without speckle or belt, his pink eye solemn and large. The repeated ripples caused by the waterfall made him seem to shudder, his great eye to wink or maybe tremble with tears (can fish cry? she wondered, not for the first time).

When she thought she had his attention, she began to tell him how she had gone to the City in the fall and met this man in George Mouse’s house, and how she had known instantly (or at least decided very quickly) that he would be the one that it had been promised she would “find or make up,” as Spark had long ago put it to her. “While you slept through the winter,” she said shyly, tracing the quartz muscle of the rock she sat on, smiling but not looking at him (because she spoke of whom she loved), “we, well we met again, and made promises—you know—” She saw him flick his ghostly tail; she knew this to be a painful subject. She stretched out her great length on the cool rock and, chin in hands and eyes alight, told him about Smoky in terms glowing and vague, which didn’t seem to move the fish to enthusiasm. She took no notice. It must be Smoky that had been meant, it could be no other. “Don’t you think so? Don’t you agree?” More cautiously then: “Will they be satisfied?”

“No telling,” Grandfather Trout said gloomily. “Who’s to say what’s in their minds?”

“But you said…”

“I bring their messages, daughter. Don’t expect any more from me.”

“Well,” she said, put out, “I won’t wait forever. I love him. Life is short.”

“Life,” said Grandfather Trout as though his throat were thick with tears, “is long. Too long.” He turned his fins carefully and with a motion of his tail slid backwards into his hiding place.

“Tell them I came, anyway,” she shouted after him, her voice small against the waterfall’s. “Tell them I did my part.”

But he was gone.

She wrote to Smoky: “I’m going to get married,” and his heart turned cold where he stood by the letter-box, until he realized she meant to him. “Great-aunt Cloud has read the cards very carefully, once for each part, it’s to be Midsummer Day and this is what you have to do. Please please follow all these instructions very carefully or I don’t know what might happen.”

Which is how Smoky came to be walking not riding to Edgewood, with a wedding-suit in his pack old not new, and food made not bought; and why he had begun to look around himself for a place to spend the night, that he must beg or find but not pay for.

Trumps Turned at Edgewood

He had not known how suddenly the industrial park would quit and the country begin. It was late afternoon and he had turned westerly, and the road had become edgeworn, and patched like an old shoe in many shades of tar. On either side the fields and farms came down to meet the road; he walked beneath guardian trees neither farm nor road that cast multifold shadows now and then over him. The gregarious weeds that frequent roadsides, dusty, thick and blowsy, friends to man and traffic, nodded from fence and ditch by the way. Less and less often he would hear the hum of a car; the hum would grow intermittently, as the car went up and down hills, and then suddenly it would be on him very loud and roar past surprised, potent, fast, leaving the weeds blown and chuckling furiously for a moment; then the roar would just as quickly subside to a far hum again, and then gone, and the only sounds the insect orchestra and his own feet striking.

For a long time he had been walking somewhat uphill, but now the incline crested, and he looked out over a broad sweep of midsummer country. The road he stood on went on down through it, past meadows and through pastures and around wooded hills; it disappeared in a valley near a little town whose steeple just showed above the bursting green, and then appeared again, a tiny gray band curling into blue mountains in whose cleft the sun was setting amid roly-poly clouds.

And just then a woman on a porch at Edgewood far away turned a trump called the Journey. There was the Traveler, pack on his back and stout stick in his hand, and the long and winding road before him to traverse; and the Sun too, though whether setting or rising she had never decided. Beside the cards’ unfolding pattern, a brown cigarette smoldered in a saucer. She moved the saucer and put the Journey in its place in the pattern, and then turned another card. It was the Host.

When Smoky reached the bottom of the first of the rolling hills the road stitched up, he was in a trough of shadow, and the sun had set.

Junipers

On the whole he preferred finding a place to sleep to asking for one; he had brought two blankets. He had even thought of finding a hay-barn to sleep in, as travelers do in books (his books), but the real haybarns he passed seemed not only Private Property but also highly functional and crowded with large animals. He began to feel, in fact, somewhat lonely as the twilight deepened and the fields grew vague, and when he came on a bungalow at the bottom of the hill he went up to its picket fence and wondered how he might phrase what he thought must be an odd request.

It was a white bungalow snuggled within bushy evergreens. Roses just blown grew up trellises beside the green dutch door. White-painted stones marked the path from the door; on the darkling lawn a young deer looked up at him immobile in surprise, and dwarves sat cross-legged on toadstools or snuck away holding treasure. On the gate was a rustic board with a legend burned on it: The Junipers. Smoky unlatched the gate and opened it, and a small bell tinkled in the silence. The top of the dutch door opened, and yellow lamplight streamed out. A woman’s voice said “Friend or foe?” and laughed.

“Friend,” he said, and walked toward the door. The air smelled unmistakably of gin. The woman leaning on the door’s bottom half was one of those with a long middle age; Smoky couldn’t tell where along it she stood. Her thin hair might have been gray or brown, she wore cat’s-eye glasses and smiled a false-toothed smile; her arms folded on the door were comfortable and freckled. “Well, I don’t know you,” she said.

“I was wondering,” Smoky said, “am I on the right road for a town called Edgewood?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” she said. “Jeff? Can you tell this young man the way to Edgewood?” She awaited an answer from within he couldn’t hear, and then opened the door. “Come in,” she said. “We’ll see.”

The house was tiny and tidy and stuffed with stuff. An old, old dog of the dust-mop kind sniffed at his feet, laughing breathlessly; be bumped into a bamboo telephone table, shouldered a knickknack shelf, stepped on a sliding scatter rug and fell through a narrow archway into a parlor that smelled of roses, bay rum and last winter’s fires. Jeff put down his newspaper and lifted his slippered feet from their hassock. “Edgewood?” he asked around his pipe.

“Edgewood. I was given directions, sort of.”

“You hitching?” Jeff’s lean mouth opened like a fish’s to puff as he perused Smoky doubtfully.

“No, walking actually.” Above the fireplace was a sampler. It said:

“I’m going there to get married.” Ahhh, they seemed to say.

“Well.” Jeff stood. “Marge, get the map.”

It was a county map or something, much more detailed than Smoky’s; he found the constellation of towns he knew of, neatly outlined, but nothing for Edgewood. “It should be somewhere around these.” Jeff found the stub of a pencil, and with a “hmmm” and a “let’s see,” connected the centers of the five towns with a five-pointed star. The pentagon enclosed by the lines of the star he tapped with the pencil, and raised his sandy eyebrows at Smoky. An old map-reader’s trick, Smoky surmised. He discerned the shadow of a road crossing the pentagon, joining the road he walked, which stopped for good here at Meadowbrook. “Hmmm,” he said.

“That’s about all I can tell you,” Jeff said, re-rolling the map.

“You going to walk all night?” Marge asked.

“Well, I’ve got a bedroll.”

Marge pursed her lips at the comfortless blankets strapped to the top of his pack. “And I suppose you haven’t eaten all day.”

“Oh, I’ve got, you know, sandwiches, and an apple…”

The kitchen was papered with baskets of impossibly luscious fruit, blue grapes and russet apples and cleft peaches that protruded like bottoms from the harvest. Marge moved dish after steaming dish from stove to oilcloth, and when it was all consumed, Jeff poured out banana liqueur into tiny ruby glasses. That did it; all his polite remonstrance with their hospitality vanished, and Marge “did up the davenport” and Smoky was put to bed wrapped in an earthbrown Indian blanket.

For a moment after the Junipers had left him, he lay awake looking around the room. It was lit only by a night-light that plugged right into the outlet, a night-light in the shape of a tiny, rosecovered cottage. By its light he saw Jeff’s maple chair, the kind whose orange paddle arms had always looked tasty to him, like glossy hard candy. He saw the ruffled curtains move in the rose-odorous breeze. He listened to the dust-mop dog sigh in his dreams. He found another sampler. This one said, he thought but could not be sure:

He slept.

Daily Alice awoke, as she always did, when the sun broke in at her eastward windows with a noise like music. She kicked off the figured coverlet and lay naked in the long bars of sun for a time, touching herself awake, finding eyes, knees, breasts, red-gold hair all in place and where she had left them. Then she stood, stretched, brushed the last of sleep from her face, and knelt by the bed amid the squares of sun and said, as she had every morning since she could speak, her prayers:

O great wide beautiful wonderful World With the wonderful waters around you curled And the beautiful grass upon your breast O World you are beautifully dressed.

A Gothic Bathroom

Devotions done, she tilted the tall standing mirror that had been her great-grandmother’s so that she could see her whole length in it, asked the usual question of it and got the right reply this morning; sometimes it was equivocal. She belted around herself a long brown gown, did a turn on her toes so that its frayed edges flew out, and went out wary into the still cold hall. She passed her father’s study and listened briefly to his old Remington click-clacking about the adventures of mice and rabbits. She opened the door to her sister Sophie’s room; Sophie was tangled in her bedclothes, a long golden hair in her parted lips, and her sleeping hands closed like a baby’s. The morning sun was just then looking in at this room, and Sophie stirred, resentful. Most people look odd asleep; foreign, not themselves. Sophie asleep looked most like Sophie, and Sophie liked sleep and could sleep anywhere, even standing up. Daily Alice stayed awhile to watch her, wondering what her adventures were. Well, she would hear later, in detail.

At the end of a whorl of hall was the Gothic bathroom, the only one in the house with a tub long enough for her. Stuck as it was at a turning of the house, the sun hadn’t yet reached it; its stained windows were dim and its cold tile floor made her stand tiptoe. The gargoyle faucet coughed phthisically, and deep within the house the plumbing held conference before allowing her some hot water. The sudden rush had its effect, and she gathered up her brown skirts around her waist and sat on the somewhat episcopal hollow throne, chin in hand, watching the steam rise from the sepulchral tub and feeling suddenly sleepy again.

She pulled the chain, and when the loud clash of contrary waters was done she unbelted and stepped from her gown, shuddered, and climbed carefully into the tub. The Gothic bathroom had filled with steam. Its sort of Gothic was really more woodland than church; the vaulting of it arched above Daily Alice’s head and interlaced like meeting branches, and everywhere carven ivy, leaves, tendrils and vines were in restless biomorphic motion. On the surface of the narrow stained-glass windows, dew formed in drops on cartoon-bright trees, and on the distant hunters and vague fields which the trees framed; and when the sun on its lazy way had lit up all twelve of these, bejewelling the fog that rose from her bath, Daily Alice lay in a pool in a medieval forest. Her great-grandfather had designed the room, but another had made the glass. His middle name was Comfort, and that’s what Daily Alice felt. She even sang.

From Side to Side

While she scrubbed and sang, her bridegroom came on, footsore and surprised at the fierceness of his muscles’ retaliation for yesterday’s walk. While she breakfasted in the long and angular kitchen and made plans with her busy mother, Smoky climbed up a buzzing, sun-shot mountain and down into a valley. When Daily Alice and Sophie were calling to each other through intersecting halls and the Doctor was looking out his window for inspiration, Smoky stood at a crossroads where four elder elms stood like grave old men conversing. A signboard there said EDGEWOOD and pointed its finger along a dirt road that looped down a shadowy tunnel of trees; and as he walked it, looking from side to side and wondering what next, Daily Alice and Sophie were in Daily Alice’s room preparing what Daily Alice next day would wear, while Sophie told her dream.

Sophie’s Dream

“I dreamt that I had learned a way of saving time I didn’t want to spend, and having it to spend when I needed it. Like the time you spend waiting in a doctor’s office, or coming back from someplace you didn’t enjoy going to, or waiting for a bus—all the little useless spaces. Well, it was a matter of taking them and folding them up, like broken boxes, so that they took up less room. It was really an easy trick, once you knew you could do it. Nobody seemed surprised at all when I told them I’d learned how; Mother just nodded and smiled, you know, as though of course everybody learns at a certain age how to do these things. Just break it along the seams; be careful not to lose any; fold it flat. Daddy gave me this enormous envelope of sort of marbled paper to put it all in, and when he gave it to me I remembered seeing envelopes like that around, and wondering what they were for. Funny how you can make up memories in dreams to explain the story.” While she talked, Sophie’s quick fingers were dealing with a hem, and Daily Alice couldn’t always hear her because she talked with pins in her mouth. The dream was hard to follow anyway; Daily Alice forgot each incident as soon as Sophie told it, just as though she were dreaming them herself. She picked up and put down a pair of satin shoes, and wandered out onto the tiny balcony of her oriel window. “I got frightened then,” Sophie was saying. “I had this big dreary envelope stuffed with unhappy time, and I didn’t know how to get any out and use it when I wanted it without letting all the dreary waiting and stuff out. It seemed maybe I’d made a mistake starting this. Anyhow…” Daily Alice looked down the front way, a brown drive with a tender spine of weed, all trembling in leaf shadow. Down at the end of the drive, gateposts grew up with a sudden curve from a wall, each topped with a pitted ball like a gray stone orange. As she looked, a Traveler turned hesitantly in at the gate.

Her heart turned over. She had been so happily calm all day that she had decided he wasn’t coming, that Somehow her heart knew he wouldn’t come today and that therefore there was no reason for it to sink and hammer in expectation. And now her heart was taken by surprise.

“Then it all got mixed up. It seemed there wasn’t any time that wasn’t being broken flat and put away, that I wasn’t doing it any more, that it was happening by itself; and that all that was left was awful time, walking down halls time, waking up in the night time, nothing doing time…”

Daily Alice let her heart hammer, there being nothing she could say to it anyway. Below, Smoky came closer, slowly, as though in awe, she could not tell of what; but when she knew that he saw her, she undid the brown robe’s belt and shrugged the robe from her shoulders. It slid open down her arms to her wrists and she could feel, like cool hands and warm, the shadows of leaves and the sun on her skin.

Led Astray

There was a hot flush in his legs that began with the soles of his feet and traveled midway up his shins, as though the long friction of his journey had heated them. His bitten head hummed with the noonday, and there was a sharp, threadlike pain in the inside of his right thigh. But he stood in Edgewood; there was no doubt. Even as he came down the path toward the immense and manyangled house, he knew he wouldn’t ask the old woman on the porch for directions, because he needed none; he had arrived. And when he came close to the house, Daily Alice showed herself to him. He stood staring, his sweat-stained pack dangling in his hand. He didn’t dare respond—there was the old woman on the porch—but he couldn’t look away.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” the old woman said at last. He blushed. She sat upright smiling at him from her peacock chair; there was a little glass-topped table by her, and she was playing solitaire. “I say—lovely,” she repedted, a little louder.

“Yes!”

“Yes… so graceful. I’m glad it’s the first thing you see, coming up the drive. The casements are new, but the balcony and all the stonework are original. Won’t you come up on the porch? It’s difficult to talk this way.”

He glanced up again, but Alice was gone now; there was only a fanciful housetop painted with sunlight. He ascended to the pillared porch. “I’m Smoky Barnable.”

“Yes. I’m Nora Cloud. Won’t you sit?” She picked up her cards with a practiced hand and put them into a velvet bag; the velvet bag she then put into a tooled box.

“Was it you then,” he said sitting in a whispering wicker chair, “who put these conditions on me about the suit and the walking and all?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I only discovered them.”

“A sort of test.”

“Perhaps. I don’t know.” She seemed surprised by the suggestion. She took from her breast pocket, where a neat and useless handkerchief was pinned, a brown cigarette, and lit it with a kitchen match she struck on her sole. She wore a light dress of the sort of print proper to old ladies, though Smoky thought he had never seen one quite so intensely blue-green, or one with leaves, tiny flowers, vines, so intricately intertwined: as though cut from the whole day. “I think prophylactic, though, on the whole.”

“Hm?”

“For your own safety.”

“Ah, I see.” They sat in silence awhile, Great-aunt Cloud’s a calm and smiling silence, his expectant; he wondered why he wasn’t taken within, introduced; he was conscious of the heat rising from his shirt’s open neck; he realized it was Sunday. He cleared his throat. “Dr. and Mrs. Drinkwater at church?”

“Why, in a sense, yes.” It was odd the way she responded to everything he said as though it were a notion that had never occurred to her before. “Are you religious?”

He had been afraid of this. “Well,” he began.

“The women tend to be more so, don’t you think?”

“I guess. No one I grew up with cared much about it.”

“My mother and I felt it far more strongly than my father, or my brothers. Though they suffered from it, perhaps, more than we.”

He had no answer for this, and couldn’t tell if her close inspection of him just then awaited one, or didn’t, or was merely short sight.

“My nephew also—Dr. Drinkwater—well of course there are the animals, which he does pay close attention to. He pays very close attention there. The rest seems to pass him by.”

“A pantheist, sort of?”

“Oh no. He’s not that foolish. It just seems to”—she moved her cigarette in the air—“pass him by. Ah, who’s here?”

A woman in a large picture hat had turned in at the gate on a bicycle. She wore a blouse, printed like Cloud’s but more patent, and a pair of large jeans. She dismounted inexpertly and took a wooden bucket from the bike’s basket; when she tilted her picture hat back, Smoky recognized Mrs. Drinkwater. She came up and sat heavily on the steps. “Cloud,” she said, “that is forever the last time I will ever ask you for advice about berrying again.”

“Mr. Barnable and I,” said Cloud merrily, “were discussing religion.”

“Cloud,” said Mrs. Drinkwater darkly, scratching her ankle above a slip-on sneaker frayed about the big toe, “Cloud, I was led astray.”

“Your bucket is full.”

“I was led astray. The bucket, hell, I filled that the first ten minutes I got there.”

“Well. There you are.”

“You didn’t say I would be led astray.”

“I didn’t ask.”

There was a pause then. Cloud smoked. Mrs. Drinkwater dreamily scratched her ankle. Smoky (who didn’t mind not being greeted by Mrs. Drinkwater; in fact hadn’t noticed it; that comes from growing up anonymous) had time to wonder why Cloud hadn’t said you didn’t ask. “As for religion,” Mrs. Drinkwater said, “ask Auberon.”

“Ah. There you see. Not a religious man.” To Smoky: “My older brother.”

“It’s all he thinks about,” Mrs. Drinkwater said.

“Yes,” Cloud said thoughtfully, “yes. Well, there it is, you see.”

“Are you religious?” Mrs. Drinkwater asked Smoky.

“He’s not,” Cloud said. “Of course there was August.”

“I didn’t have a religious childhood,” Smoky said. He grinned. “I guess I was sort of a polytheist.”

“What?” said Mrs. Drinkwater.

“The Pantheon. I had a classical education.”

“You have to start somewhere,” she replied, picking leaves and small bugs from her bucket of berries. “This should be nearly the last of the foul things. Tomorrow’s Midsummer Day, thank it all.”

“My brother August,” Cloud said, “Alice’s grandfather, he was perhaps religious. He left. For parts unknown.”

“A missionary?” Smoky asked.

“Why yes,” Cloud said, again seeming newly struck with the idea. “Yes, maybe so.”

“They must be dressed by now,” Mrs. Drinkwater said. “Suppose we go in.”

An Imaginary Bedroom

The screen door was old and large, its wood pierced and turned a bit to summery effect, and the screen potbellied below from years of children’s thoughtless egress; when Smoky pulled its porcelain handle, the rusty spring groaned. He stepped across the sill. He was inside.

The vestibule, tall and polished, smelled of cool trapped night air and last winter’s fires, lavender sachets in brass-handled linen closets, what else? Wax, sunlight, collated seasons, the June day outside brought in as the screen groaned and clacked shut behind him. The stairs rose before him and above him, turning a half-circle by stages to the floor above. On the first landing, in the light of a Iancet window there, dressed now in jeans made all of patches, her feet bare, his bride stood. A little behind her was Sophie, a year older now but still not her sister’s height, in a thin white dress and many rings.

“Hi,” said Daily Alice.

“Hi,” Smoky said.

“Take Smoky upstairs,” Mrs. Drinkwater said. “He’s in the imaginary bedroom. And I’m sure he wants to wash up.” She patted his shoulder and he put his foot on the first stair. In later years he would wonder, sometimes idly, sometimes in anguish, whether having once entered here he had ever again truly left; but at the time he just mounted to where she stood, deliriously happy that after a long and extremely odd journey he had at last arrived and that she was greeting him with brown eyes full of promise (and perhaps then this was the journey’s only purpose, his present happiness, and if so a good one and all right with him) and taking his pack and his hand and leading him into the cool upper regions of the house.

“I could use a wash,” he said, a little breathless. She dipped her big head near his ear and said, “I’ll lick you clean, like a cat.” Sophie giggled behind them.

“Hall,” Alice said, running her hand along the dark wainscoting. She patted the glass doorknobs she passed: “Mom and Dad’s room. Dad’s study—shhh. My room—see?” He peeked in, and mostly saw himself in the tall mirror. “Imaginary study. Old orrery, up those stairs. Turn left, then turn left.” The hallway seemed concentric, and Smoky wondered how all these rooms managed to sprout off it. “Here,” she said.

The room was of indiscernible shape; the ceiling sank toward one corner sharply, which made one end of the room lower than the other; the windows there were smaller too; the room seemed larger than it was, or was smaller than it looked, he couldn’t decide which. Alice threw his pack on the bed, narrow and spread for summer in dotted swiss. “The bathroom’s down the hall,” she said. “Sophie, go run some water.”

“Is there a shower?” he asked, imagining the hard plunge of cool water.

“Nope,” Sophie said. “We were going to modernize the plumbing, but we can’t find it anymore…”

“Sophie.”

Sophie shut the door on them.

First she wanted to taste the sweat that shone on his throat and fragile clavicle; then he chose to undo the tails of her shirt, that she had tied up beneath her breasts; then, but then impatient they forgot about taking turns and quarreled silently, eagerly over each other, like pirates dividing treasure long sought, long imagined, long withheld.

In the Walled Garden

Alone together at noon they ate peanut-butter and apple sandwiches in the walled garden at the back front of the house.

“The back front?”

Opulent trees looked over the gray garden wall, like calm spectators leaning on their elbows. The stone table they sat at, in a corner beneath a spreading beech, was marked with the coiled stains left by caterpillars crushed in other summers; their cheerful paper plates lay on its thickness flimsy and ephemeral. Smoky struggled to clear his palate; he didn’t usually eat peanut-butter.

“This used to be the front,” Daily Alice said. “Then they built the garden and the wall; so the back became the front. It was a front anyway. And now this is the back front.” She straddled the bench, and picked up a twig, at the same time drawing out with her pinkie a glittering hair that had blown between her lips. She scratched a quick five-pointed star in the dirt. Smoky looked at it, and at the tautness of her jeans. “That’s not really it,” she said, looking birdwise at her star, “but sort of. See, it’s a house all fronts. It was built to be a sample. My great-grandfather? Who I wrote you about? He built this house to be a sample, so people could come and look at it, from any side, and choose which kind of house they wanted; that’s why the inside is so crazy. It’s so many houses, sort of put inside each other or across each other, with their fronts sticking out.”

“What?” He had been watching her talk, not listening; she saw it in his face and laughed. “Look. See?” she said. He looked where she pointed, along the back front. It was a severe, classical facade softened by ivy, its gray stone stained as though by dark tears; tall, arched windows; symmetrical detail he recognized as the classical Orders; rustications, columns, plinths. Someone was looking out one tall window with an air of melancholy. “Now come on.” She took a big bite (big teeth) and led him by the hand along that front, and as they passed, it seemed to fold like scenery; what had looked flat became out-thrust; what stuck out folded in; pillars turned pilasters and disappeared. Like one of those ripply pictures children play with, where a face turns from grim to grin as you move it, the back front altered, and when they reached the opposite wall and turned to look back, the house had become cheerful and mock-Tudor, with deep curling eaves and clustered chimneys like comic hats. One of the broad casement windows (a stained piece or two glittered among the leaded panes) opened on the second floor, and Sophie looked out, waving. “Smoky,” she called, “when you’ve finished your lunch, you’re to go talk to Daddy in the library.” She stayed in the window, arms folded and resting on the sill, looking down at him smiling, as though pleased to have brought this news.

“Oh, aha,” Smoky called up nonchalantly. He walked back to the stone table, the house translating itself back into Latin beside him. Daily Alice was eating his sandwich. “What am I going to say to him?” She shrugged, mouth full. “What if he asks me what are your prospects, young man?” She laughed, covering her mouth, the way she had in George Mouse’s library. “Well, I can’t just tell him I read the telephone book.” The immensity of what he was about to embark on, and Doctor Drinkwater’s obvious responsibility to impress it on him, settled on his shoulders like birds. He wavered suddenly, doubted doubts. He looked at his big beloved. What anyway were his prospects? Could he explain to the Doctor that his daughter had cured Smoky’s anonymity as if in one blow—one glancing blow—and that that was enough? That the marriage service once completed (and whatever religious commitments they would like him to make made) he intended to just live happily ever after, like other folks?

She had taken out a little jackknife and was peeling a green apple in one segmented curling ribbon. She had such talents. What good was he to her?

“Do you like children?” she asked, without taking her eyes from her apple.

Houses & Histories

It was dim in the library, according to the old philosophy of keeping a house shut up on hot summer days to keep it cool. It was cool. Dr. Drinkwater wasn’t there. Through the draped, arched windows he could just glimpse Daily Alice and Sophie talking at the stone table in the garden, and he felt like a boy kept indoors, bad or sickly. He yawned nervously, and looked over nearby titles; it didn’t appear that anyone had taken a book from these laden shelves in a long time. There were sets of sermons, volumes of George MacDonald, Andrew Jackson Davis, Swedenborg. There were a couple of yards of the Doctor’s children’s stories, pretty, shoddily bound, with repetitious titles. Some nicely bound classics propped against an anonymous laureled bust. He took down Suetonius, and brought down with it a pamphlet that had been wedged between the volumes. It was old, both dog-eared and foxed, illustrated with pearly photogravure, and titled Upstate Houses and Their Histories. He turned its pages carefully so as not to break the old glue of the binding, looking at dim gardens of black flowers, a roofless castle built on a river island by a thread magnate, a house made of beer vats.

He looked up, turning the page. Daily Alice and Sophie were gone; a paper plate leapt from the table and spun balletically to the ground.

And here was a photograph of two people sitting at a stone table, having tea. There was a man who looked like the poet Yeats, in a pale summer suit and spotted tie, his hair full and white, his eyes obscured by the sunlight glinting from his spectacles; and a younger woman in a wide white hat, her dark features shaded by the hat and blurred perhaps by a sudden movement. Behind them was part of this house Smoky sat in, and beside them, reaching up a tiny hand to the woman, who perhaps saw it and moved to take it and then again perhaps not (it was hard to tell), was a figure, personage, a little creature about a foot high in a conical hat and pointed shoes. His broad inhuman features seemed blurred too by sudden movement, and he appeared to hear a pair of gauzy insect wings. The caption read “John Drinkwater and Mrs. Drinkwater (Violet Bramble;) elf. Edgewood, 1912.” Below the picture, the author had this to say:

“Oddest of the turn-of-the-century folly houses may be John Drinkwater’s Edgewood, although not strictly conceived as a folly at all. Its history must begin with the first publication of Drinkwater’s Architecture of Country Houses in 1880. This charming and influential compendium of Victorian domestic architecture made the young Drinkwater’s name, and he later became a partner in the famed landscape-architecture team of Mouse, Stone. In 1894 Drinkwater designed Edgewood as a kind of compound illustration of the plates of his famous book, thus making it several different houses of different sizes and styles collapsed together and quite literally impossible to describe. That it presents an aspect (or aspects) of logic and order is a credit to Drinkwater’s (already waning) powers. In 1897 Drinkwater married Violet Bramble, a young Englishwoman, daughter of the mystic preacher Theodore Burne Bramble, and in the course of his marriage, came completely under the influence of his wife, a magnetic spiritualist. Her thought informs later editions of Architecture of Country Houses, into which he interpolated larger and larger amounts of theosophist or idealist philosophy without however removing any of the original material. The sixth and last edition (1910) had to be printed privately, since commercial publishers were no longer willing to undertake it, and it still contains all the plates of the 1880 edition.

“The Drinkwaters assembled around them in those years a group of like-thinking people including artists, aesthetes, and world-weary sensitives. From the beginning the cult had an Anglophile twist, and interested correspondents included the poet Yeats, J. M. Barrie, several well-known illustrators, and the sort of ‘poetic’ personality that was allowed to flourish in that happy twilight before the Great War, and that has disappeared in the harsh light of the present day.

“An interesting sidelight is that these people were able to profit from the general depopulation of the farms in that area at that time. The pentagon of five towns around Edgewood saw the heels of improverished yeoman farmers driven to the City and the West, and the bland faces of poets escaping economic realities who came to take their houses. That all who still remained of this tiny band were ‘conscientious objectors’ at the time of their country’s greatest need is perhaps not surprising; nor is the fact that no trace of their bizarre and fruitless mysteries has survived to this day.

“The house is still lived in by Drinkwater’s heirs. There is reputed to be a genuine folly summer house on the (very extensive) grounds, but the house and grounds are not open to the public at any time.”

Elf?

Doctor Drinkwater’s Advice

So we’re supposed to have a chat,” Dr. Drinkwater said. “Where would you like to sit?” Smoky took a club chair of buttoned leather. Dr. Drinkwater, on the chesterfield, ran his hand over his woolly head, sucked his teeth for a moment, then coughed in an introductory kind of way. Smoky awaited his first question.

“Do you like animals?” he said.

“Well,” Smoky said, “I haven’t known very many. My father liked dogs.” Doctor Drinkwater nodded with a disappointed air. “I always lived in cities, or suburbs. I liked listening to the birds in the morning.” He paused. “I’ve read your stories. I think they’re… very true to life, I imagine.” He smiled what he instantly realized to be a horridly ingratiating smile, but the Doctor didn’t seem to notice. He only sighed deeply.

“I suppose,” he said, “you’re aware of what you’re getting into.”

Now Smoky cleared his throat in introduction. “Well, sir, of course I know I can’t give Alice, well, the splendor she’s used to, at least not for a while. I’m—in research. I’ve had a good education, not really formal, but I’m finding out how to use my, what I know. I might teach.”

“Teach?”

“Classics.”

The doctor had been gazing upward at the high shelves burdened with dark volumes. “Um. This room gives me the willies. Go talk to the boy in the library, Mother says. I never come in here if I can help it. What is it you teach, did you say?”

“Well, I don’t yet. I’m—breaking into it.”

“Can you write? I mean write handwriting? That’s very important for a teacher.”

“Oh, yes. I have a good hand.” Silence. “I’ve got a little money, an inheritance…”

“Oh, money. There’s no worry there. We’re rich.” He grinned at Smoky. “Rich as Croesus.” He leaned back, clutching one flannel knee in his oddly small hands. “My grandfather’s, mostly. He was an architect. And then my own, from the stories. And we’ve had good advice.” He looked at Smoky in a strange, almost pitying way. “That you can always count on having—good advice.” Then, as if he had delivered a piece of it himself, he unfolded his legs, slapped his knees, and got up. “Well. Time I was going. I’ll see you at dinner? Good. Don’t wear yourself out. You’ve got a long day tomorrow.” He spoke this last out the door, so eager was he to go.

The Architecture of Country Houses

He had noticed them, behind glass doors up behind where Doctor Drinkwater had sat on the chesterfield; he got up now on his knees on the sofa, turned the convolute key in its lock, and slid open the door. There they were, six together, Just as the guidebook had said, neatly graduated in thickness. Around them, leaning together or stacked up horizontally, were others, other printings perhaps He took out the slimmest one, an inch or so thick. Arc hitecture of Country Houses. Intaglie cover, with that “rustic” Victorian lettering (running biaswise) that sprouts twigs and leaves. The olive color of dead foliage. He riffled the heavy leaves. The Perpendicular, Full or Modified. The Italianate Villa, suitable for a residence on an open field or campagna. The Tudor and the Modified Neo-classical, here chastely on separate pages. The Cottage. The Manor. Each in its etched circumstances of poplars or pines, fountain or mountain, with little black visitors come to call, or were they the proud owners come to take possession? He thought that if all the plates were on glass, he could hold them all up at once to the mote-inhabited bar of sunlight from the window and Edgewood would appear whole. He read a bit of the text, which gave careful dimensions, optional fancies, full and funny accounting of costs (ten-dollar-a-week stonemasons long dead and their skills and secrets buried too) and, oddly, what sort of house suited what sort of personality and calling. He returned it.

The next one he drew out was nearly twice as thick. Fourth edition, it said, Little, Brown, Boston 1898. It had a frontispiece, a sad, soft pencil portrait of Drinkwater. Smoky vaguely recognized the artist’s hyphenated double name. Its chock-full title page had an epigraph: I arise, and unbuild it again. Shelley. The plates were the same, though there were a set of Combinations that were all floorplans and labeled in a way Smoky couldn’t comprehend.

The sixth and last edition, great and heavy, was beautifully bound in art-nouveau mauve; the letters of the title stretched out shuddered limbs and curling descenders as though to grow; the whole seemed as though reflected in a rippled lily-pond surface all in bloom at evening. The frontispiece was not Drinkwater now but his wife, a photograph like a drawing, smudged like charcoal. Her indistinct features. Perhaps it wasn’t the art. Perhaps she was as he had been, not always fully present; but she was lovely. There were dedicatory poems and epistles and a great armor of Prefaces, Forewords and Prolegomena, red type and black; and then the little houses again just as before, looking now old-fashioned and awkward, like an ordinary small town swept up in a modern mania. As though Violet’s amanuensis were struggling for some last grasp of reason over the pages and pages studded with capitalized abstractions (the type had grown smaller as books had grown thicker), there were marginal glosses every page or so, and epigraphs, chapter headings, and all paraphernalia that makes a text into an object, logical, articulated, unreadable. Tipped in at the end against the watered endpapers was a chart or map, folded over several times, a thick packet in fact. It was of thin paper, and Smoky at first couldn’t see how to go about unfolding it; he began one way, winced at the little cry it made as an old fold tore slightly, began again. As he glimpsed parts of it, he could see it was an immense plan, but of what? At last he had the whole unfolded; it lay crackling across his lap face down, he had only to turn it face up. He stopped then, not sure he wanted to see what it was. I suppose, the Doctor had said, you’re aware of what you’re getting into. He lifted its edge, it rose up lightly like a moth’s wing so old and fine it was, a shaft of sunlight pierced it and he glimpsed complex shapes studded with notions; he laid it down to look at it.

Just Then

“Will she go, then, Cloud?” Mother asked, and Cloud answered, “Well it appears not so;” but she wouldn’t add any more, only sat at the far end of the kitchen table, the smoke of her cigarette an obscurity in the sunlight. Mother was powdered to the elbows in the process of pie-making, not a mindless task though she liked to call it that, in fact she found that at it her thoughts were often clearest, notions sharpest; she could do things when her body was busy that she could at no other time, things like assemble her worries into ranks, each rank commanded by a hope. She remembered verse sometimes cooking that she had forgotten she knew, or spoke in tongues, her husband’s or her children’s or her dead father’s or her unborn, clearly-seen grandchildren’s, three graduated girls and a lean unhappy boy. She knew the weather in her elbows, and mentioned as she slipped the old glass pie-plates into the oven which breathed its heated breath on her that it would storm soon. Cloud made no answer, only sighed and smoked, and dabbed at the dew at her wrinkled throat with a little hankie which she then tucked neatly back into her sleeve. She said: “It will be lots clearer later,” and went slowly from the kitchen and through the halls to her room to see if she might be able to close her eyes for a while before dinner had to be prepared; and before she lay down on the wide featherbed that for a few short years had been hers and Henry Cloud’s she looked out toward the hills and yes, white cumulus had begun to assemble itself that way, climbing like imminent victory, and no doubt Sophie was right. She lay and thought: At least he came all right, and contradicted none of it. Beyond that she couldn’t tell.

Just then where the Old Stone Fence divides the Green Meadow from the Old Pasture which goes down rocky and leaping with insects to the margin of the Lily Pond, Doctor Drinkwater in a wide-awake hat stopped, panting from his climb; slowly the roar of his own blood diminished in his ears and he could begin to listen to the scene in progress of his only drama, the interminable conversations of birds, cicada’s semitune, the rustle and thump of a thousand creatures’ entrances and exits. The land was touched by the hand of man, though that hand was in these days mostly withdrawn; way down beyond the Lily Pond he could see the dreaming roof of Brown’s barn, and knew this to be an abandoned pasture of his enterprise, and this wall his ancient marker. The scene was variegated by man’s enterprise, and room made for many houses large and small, this capacious wall, that sunny pasture, that pond. It all seemed to the Doctor just what was truly meant by the word “ecology,” which he saw now and then misused in the dense columns that bordered his chronicles of this place in the City paper; and as he sat on a warm lichened stone utterly attentive, a Little Breeze brought him news that by evening a mountain of cloud would break in pieces here.

Just then in Sophie’s room on the wide featherbed where for many years John Drinkwater lay with Violet Bramble, their two great-grandchildren lay. The long pale dress that next day Daily Alice would put on, and then presumably not again ever completely put off, was hung carefully from the top of the closet door, and made in the closet door mirror another like it, which it pressed back to back; and below it and around it were all things proper to it. Sophie and her sister lay naked in the afternoon heat; Sophie brushed her hand across her sister’s sweat-damp flank, and Daily Alice said “Ah, it’s too hot,” and felt hotter still her sister’s tears on her shoulder. She said: “Someday soon it’ll be you, you’ll choose or maybe be chosen, and you’ll be another June bride,” and Sophie said, “I’ll never, never,” and more that Alice couldn’t hear because Sophie buried her face against her sister’s neck and murmured like the afternoon; what Sophie said was, “He’ll never understand or see, they’ll never give him what they gave us, he’ll step in the wrong places and look when he should look away, never see doors or know turnings; wait and see, you just wait and see”; which just then Great-aunt Cloud was pondering, what they would see if they waited, and what their mother also felt though not with the same plain curiosity but a sort of maneuvering within of the armies of Possibility; and what Smoky too, left alone for what he imagined was the general Sunday siesta, day of rest, in the black and dusty library with the whole plan before him, just then trembled with, sleepless and erect as a flame.

It was during a glad summer toward the end of the last century that John Drinkwater, while on a walking tour of England ostensibly to look at houses, came one twilight to the gates of a red-brick vicarage in Cheshire. He had lost his way, and his guidebook, which he had foolishly knocked into the millrace by which he had eaten his lunch hours before; he was hungry, and however safe and sweet the English countryside he couldn’t help feeling uneasy.

Strange Insides

In the vicarage garden, an unkempt and riotous garden, moths glimmered amid a dense cascade of rosebushes, and birds flitted and rustled in a gnarled and domineering apple tree. In the tree’s crook someone sat and, as he looked, lit a candle. A candle? It was a young girl in white, and she cupped the candle with her hands; it glowed and faded and then glowed again. She spoke, not to him: “What’s the matter?” The candleglow was extinguished, and he said, “I beg your pardon.” She began to climb quickly and expertly down from the tree, and he stood away from the gate so as not to look importunate and prying when she came to speak to him. But she didn’t come. From somewhere or everywhere a nightingale began, ceased, began again.

He had come not long before to a crossroads (not a literal crossroads, though many of those too in his month’s walk where he had to choose to go down by the water or over the hill, and found it not much use as practice for the crossroads in his life). He had spent a hateful year designing an enormous Skyscraper that was to look, as exactly as its hugeness and use allowed, like a thirteenth-century cathedral. When he had first submitted sketches to his client it had been in the nature of a joke, a fancy, a red herring even, meant to be dismissed, but the client hadn’t understood that; he wanted his Skyscraper to be just this, just what it eventually would become, a Cathedral of Commerce, and nothing John Drinkwater could think of, brass letterbox like a baptismal font, grotesque basreliefs in Cluniac style of dwarves using telephones or reading stone ticker tape, gargoyles projecting from the building at such a height that no one could ever see them and wearing (though even that the man had refused to recognize) his client’s own headlamp eyes and porous nose—nothing was too much for him and now it would all have to be executed just as he had conceived it.

While this project dragged on, a change attempted to come over him. Attempted, because he resisted it; it seemed a thing apart from him, a thing he could almost hut not quite name. He first noticed it as an insinuation into his crowded yet orderly day of peculiar daydreams: abstract words merely, that would suddenly he spoken within him as though by a voice. Multiplicity was one. Another on another day (as he sat looking out the tall windows of the University Club at the sooty rain) was combinatory. Once uttered, the notion had a way of taking over his whole mind, extending into the work-place there and into the countinghouse, until he was left paralyzed and unable to take the next long-prepared and wellthought-out step in the career everyone described as “meteoric.”

He felt he was lapsing into a long dream, or perhaps awaking from one. Either way, he didn’t want it to happen. As a specific against it (he thought) he began to take an interest in theology. He read Swedenborg and Augustine; he was soothed most by Aquinas, could sense the Angelic Doctor building stone by stone the great cathedral of his Summa. He learned then that at the end of his life Aquinas regarded all that he had written as “a heap of straw.”

A heap of straw. Drinkwater sat at his broad board in the long skylit offices of Mouse, Drinkwater, Stone and stared at the sepia photographs of the towers and parks and villas he had built, and thought: a heap of straw. Like the first and most ephemeral house the Three Pigs in the story built. There must be a stronger place, a place where he could hide from whatever this wolf was that pursued him. He was thirty-nine years old.

His partner Mouse found that after he had been some months at his drawing board he had gotten no further with firm plans for the Cathedral of Commerce, had been sitting instead hour after hour doodling tiny houses with strange insides; and he was sent abroad for a while, to rest.

Strange insides… By the path that led up from the gate to the fanlighted door of the vicarage he could see a machine or garden ornament, a white globe on a pedestal surrounded by rusted iron hoops. Some of the hoops had sprung and lay fallen on the path, obscured in weeds. He pushed the gate and it opened, making a brief song on its hinges. Within the house a light was moving, and as he came up the weedy path he was hailed from the door.

For It Was He

“You are not welcome,” said Dr. Bramble (for it was he). “You are none of you, any more. Is that you, Fred? I shall have a lock to that gate, if people can’t have better manners.”

“I’m not Fred.”

His accent made Dr. Bramble stop to think. He raised his lamp. “Who are you then?”

“Just a traveler. I’m afraid I’ve lost my way. You don’t have a telephone.”

“Of course not.”

“I didn’t mean to barge in.”

“Mind the old orrery there. It’s all fallen, and a dreadful trap. American?”

“Yes.”

“Well, well, come in.”

The girl was gone.

Strange and Shaded Lanes

Two years later, John Drinkwater was sitting sleepily in the overheated and spiritually-lit rooms of the City Theosophical Society (he never guessed that any of the ways his crossroads pointed out would lead him there, but there he was). A subscription was being raised for a course of lectures by variously enlightened persons, and among the mediums and gymnosophists who were awaiting the Society’s decision, Drinkwater found the name of Dr. Theodore Burne Bramble, to speak on the Smaller Worlds within the Large. As soon as he read the name he saw, at once and unsummoned, the girl within the apple tree, the light within her cupped hands going dim. What’s the matter? He saw her again come into the dusky dining room, unintroduced by the vicar who couldn’t bring himself to break his paragraph long enough to speak her name, only nodded and pushed aside a pile of mildewed books and sheaves of papers tied with blue tape so that there was room for her to put down (without raising her eyes to him) the tarnished tea service and cracked plate of kippers. She might have been daughter or ward or servant or prisoner—or keeper even, for Dr. Bramble’s ideas were odd and obsessive enough, though mildly expressed.

“Paracelsus is of the opinion, you see,” he said, and paused to light his pipe; Drinkwater managed to say, “The young lady is your daughter?”

Bramble shot a look behind him as though Drinkwater had seen some member of the Bramble family he didn’t know about; then he agreed, nodding, and went on: “Paracelsus, you see…”

She brought white port and ruby, unsummoned, and when that was gone Dr. Bramble was inflamed enough to speak of some of his personal sorrows, how his pulpit had been taken from him because he would speak the truth as he learned it, and how they came around now to taunt him and tie tins to his dog’s tail, poor dumb creature! She brought whiskey and brandy and at last he didn’t care and asked her her name. “Violet,” she said, not looking at him. When Dr. Bramble finally showed him to a bed, it was only because if he had not Drinkwater would have got out of earshot; as it was he had ceased to understand anything Dr. Bramble was saying. “Houses made of houses within houses made of time,” he found himself saying aloud when just before dawn he awoke from a dream of Dr. Bramble’s kindly face and with a fierce burning in his throat. When he tipped up the ewer at his bedside a discomfited spider crawled out, and he stood at the window unrelieved, pressing the cool porcelain to his cheek. He looked out at the wind-ordered islands of mist that lay between the lacy cutout trees, and watched the last fireflies extinguishing themselves. He saw her returning from the barn, shoeless and in her pale dress, with a bucket of milk in each hand that threw out drops on the ground at her every step however carefully she walked; and he understood, in a moment of knifelike clarity, how he would go about making a sort of house, a house that a year and some months later became the house Edgewood.

And here now in New York was her name before him, whom he had thought never to see again. He signed the subscription.

He knew that she would accompany her father, knew this the moment he read the name. He knew, Somehow, that she would be even more lovely and that her never-cut hair would be two years longer. He didn’t know that she would arrive three months pregnant by Fred Reynard or Oliver Hawksquill or some other not welcome at the parsonage (he never asked the name); it didn’t occur to him that she, like him, would be two years older, and have come upon hard crossroads of her own, and gone a ways down strange and shaded lanes.

Call Them Doors

“Paracelsus is of the opinion,”- Dr. Bramble told the theosophists, “that the universe is crowded with powers, spirits, who are not quite immaterial—whatever that means or meant, perhaps made of some finer, less tangible stuff than the ordinary world. They fill up the air and the water and so on; they surround us on every side, so that at our every movement” —he moved his long-fingered hand gently in the air, causing turmoil amid his pipesmoke—“we displace thousands.”

She sat by the door, just out of the light of a red-shaded lamp, bored or nervous or both; her cheek was in her palm and the lamp lit the dark down of her arms and turned it blond. Her eyes were deep and feral, and she had a single eyebrow—that is, it extended without a break across her nose, unplucked and thick. She didn’t look at him, or when she did didn’t see him.

“Nereids, dryads, sylphs, and salamanders is how Paracelsus divides them,” Dr. Bramble said. “That is to say (as we would express it) mermaids, elves, fairies, and goblins or imps. One class of spirit for each of the four elements—mermaids for the water, elves for the earth, fairies for the air, goblins for the fire. It is thus that we derive the common name for all such beings—‘elementals.’ Very regular and neat. Paracelsus had an orderly mind. It is not, however, true, based as it is on the common error—the old, the great error that underlies the whole history of our science—that there are these four elements, earth, air, fire, water, out of which the world is made. We know now of course that there are some ninety elements, and that the old four are not among them.”

There was a stirring at this among the more radical or Rosicrucian wing of the assembly, who still set great store by the Four, and Dr. Bramble, who desperately needed this appearance to be a success, gulped water from a goblet beside him, cleared his throat, and tried to march on to the more sensational or revelatory parts of his lecture. “The question is really,” he said “why, if the ‘elementals’ are not several kinds of being but only one, which I believe, why they manifest themselves in such various forms. That they do manifest themselves, ladies and gentlemen, is no longer open to doubt.” He looked meaningfully at his daughter, and many there did also; it was her experiences, after all, that lent Dr. Bramble’s notions what weight they had. She smiled, faintly, and seemed to contract beneath their gaze. “Now,” he said. “Collating the various experiences, both those told of in myth and fable and those more recent ones verifiable by investigation, we find that these elementals, while separable into two basic characters, can be any of several different sizes and (as we might put it) densities.

“The two distinct characters—the ethereal, beautiful, and elevated character on the one hand, and the impish, earthy, gnomelike character on the other, is in fact a sexual distinction. The sexes among these beings are much more distinct than among men.

“The differences observed in size is another matter. What are the differences? In their sylphlike or pixie manifestation they appear no bigger than a large insect, or a hummingbird; they are said to inhabit the woods, they are associated with flowers. Droll tales are spun of their spears of locust-thorns and their chariots made of nutshells drawn by dragonflies, and so on. In other instances, they appear to be a foot to three feet in height, wingless, fully-formed little men and women of more human habits. And there are fairy maidens who capture the hearts of, and can apparently lie with, humans, and who are the size of human maidens. And there are fairy warriors on great steeds, banshees and pookahs and ogres who are huge, larger by far than men.

“What is the explanation for this?

“The explanation is that the world inhabited by these beings is not the world we inhabit. It is another world entirely, and it is enclosed within this one; it is in a sense a universal retreating mirror image of this one, with a peculiar geography I can only describe as infundibular.” He paused for effect. “I mean by this that the other world is composed of a series of concentric rings, which as one penetrates deeper into the other world, grow larger. The further in you go, the bigger it gets. Each perimeter of this series of concentricities encloses a larger world within, until, at the center point, it is infinite. Or at least very very large.” He drank water again. As always when he began to explain it all, it began to leak away from him; the perfect clarity of it, the just-seizable perfect paradox of it, which sometimes rang like a hell within him, was so difficult— maybe, oh Lord, impossible—to express. The unmoved faces before him waited. “We men, you see, inhabit what is in fact the vastest outermost circle of the converse infundibulum which is the other world. Paracelsus is right: our every movement is accompanied by these beings, but we fail to perceive them not because they are intangible but because, out here, they are too small to be seen!

“Around the inner perimeter of this circle which is our daily world are many, many ways—call them doors—by which we can enter the next smaller, that is larger, circle of their world. Here the inhabitants appear the size of ghost-birds or errant candle-flames. This is our most common experience of them, because it is only through this first perimeter that most people ever pass, if at all. The next-innermost perimeter is smaller, and thus has fewer doors; it is therefore less likely anyone would step through by chance. There, the inhabitants will appear fairy-children or Little People, a manifestation correspondingly less often observed. And so on further within: the vast, inner circles where they grow to full size are so tiny that we step completely over them, constantly, in our daily lives, without knowing we do so, and never enter there at all—though it may be that in the old heroic age, access there was easier, and so we have the many tales of deeds done there. And lastly, the vastest circle, the infinity, the center point—Faëry, ladies and gentlemen, where the heroes ride across endless landscapes and sail sea beyond sea and there is no end to possibility—why that circle is so tiny it has no door at all.”

He sat, spent. “Now.” He put his dead pipe between his teeth. “Before I proceed to certain evidences, certain demonstrations, mathematical and topographical” —he patted a messy pile of papers and place-marked books beside him—“you should know that there are individuals to whom it is given to be able to penetrate at will, or nearly, the small worlds I have discussed. If you require firsthand evidence of the general propositions I have laid down, my daughter Miss Violet Bramble…”

The company, murmuring (it was this they had come for), turned toward where Violet sat in the light of the red-shaded lamp.

The girl was gone.

No End to Possibility

It was Drinkwater who found her, huddled on the landing of the stairs that led up from the Society’s rooms to a lawyer’s office on the next floor. She didn’t stir as he climbed toward her, only her eyes moved, searching him. When he moved to light the gas above her, she touched his shin: “Don’t.”

“Are you ill?”

“No.”

“Afraid?”

She didn’t answer. He sat down beside her and took her hand. “Now, my child,” he said paternally, hut felt a thrill as though some current ran through her hand to his. “They don’t want to hurt you, you know, they won’t badger you…”

“I am not,” she said slowly, “a circus show.”

“No.” How old could she be, to have to live so—fifteen, sixteen? Closer to her now, he could see that she was weeping softly; big tears formed in the dark pools of her eyes, trembled at the thick lashes, and tumbled one by one down her cheek.

“I feel so sorry for him, He hates to do this to me and yet he does it. It’s because we’re desperate.” She said it quite simply, as though she had said “It’s because we’re English.” She hadn’t released his hand; perhaps she hadn’t noticed it.

“Let me help.” That had sprung to his lips, but he felt any choice about her was anyway beyond him; the two years of vain struggle that lay between the twilight he saw her in the apple tree and now seemed to shrivel into a mote and blow away. He must protect her; he would take her away, somewhere safe, somewhere… She would say nothing further, and he could not; he knew that his well-built life, masoned and furnished over forty careful years, had not weathered the wind of his dissatisfaction: he felt it crumble, the foundations slipped, vast cracks appeared, the whole edifice of it caved in with a long noise he could almost hear. He was kissing the warm salt tears from her cheek.

A Turn Around the House

“Perhaps,” John Drinkwater said to Violet when all their boxes and trunks had been piled in the doorway for the servant to put away, and Dr. Bramble had been installed in a comfortable chair on the wide marmoreal porch, “you’d like to take a turn around the house.”

Wisteria had been trained up the tapering columns of the porch, and their crystalline green leaves, though the summer was young, already curtained the scenes he offered them with his hand, the broad lawn and young plantings, the view to a pavilion, the distant sheet of water arched by a neat classical bridge.

Dr. Bramble declined, already drawing an octavo volume from his pocket. Violet murmured her assent (how demure she must now be, in this great place; she had expected log cabins and red Indians; she really knew very little). She took the arm he offered her—a builder’s strong arm she thought—and they went out across the new lawn, walking a gravel path between stone sphinxes set at intervals to guard the way. (The sphinxes were cut by his Italian stonemason friends, the same who were just then cutting garlands of grapes and queer faces all across the facades of his partner Mouse’s City blocks; they were cut quickly in soft stone that the years would not be kind to, but that was all to come.)

“You must stay on now as long as you like,” Drinkwater said. He had said it in Sherry’s restaurant where he had taken them after the lecture ended inconclusively, when he had first shyly but insistently invited them. He had said it again in the mean and odorous hotel lobby when he came to collect them, and in Grand Central Station beneath the great twinkling zodiac which (Dr. Bramble couldn’t help but notice) ran the wrong way across the night-blue ceiling. And again in the train as she nodded in a doze beneath the silk rosebud which nodded too in its railroad bud-vase.

But how long did she like?

“It’s very kind of you,” she said.

You will live in many houses, Mrs. Underhill had told her. You will wander, and live in many houses. She had wept hearing that, or rather later when she thought of it on trains and boats and in waiting rooms, not knowing how many houses were many or how long it took to live in one. For sure it would take an immensity of time, for since they had left the vicarage in Cheshire six months ago they had lived only in hotels and lodgings, and seemed likely to go on doing so; how long?

As in a drill, they marched up one neat stone path, turned right, marched along another. Drinkwater made an introductory noise to announce he was about to break the silence they had fallen into.

“I’m so interested in these, well, experiences of yours,” he said. He raised an honest palm. “I don’t mean to pry, or upset you if it upsets you to talk of them. I’m just very interested.”

She said nothing. She could only tell him that they were all over in any case. Her heart for a moment grew great and hollow, and he seemed to sense it, because he pressed the arm he held, very slightly. “Other worlds,” he said dreamily. “Worlds within worlds.” He drew her to one of the many small benches set against a curving, clipped wall of box-hedge. The complex housefront beyond, buffcolored and patent in the late afternoon sun, seemed to her severe yet smiling, like Erasmus’ face in a frontispiece she had seen over Father’s shoulder.

“Well,” she said. “Those ideas, about worlds within worlds and all that, those are Father’s ideas. I don’t know.”

“But you’ve been there.”

“Father says I have.” She crossed her legs and covered an old ineradicable brown stain on her muslin dress with interlaced fingers. “I never expected this, you know. I only told him about… all that, what had happened to me—because I hoped to lift his spirits. To tell him it would be all right, that all the troubles were part of the Tale.”

“Tale?”

She grew circumspect. “I mean I never expected this. To leave home. To leave…” Them, she almost said, but since the night at the Theosophical Society—the last straw!—she had resolved not to speak any more about them. It was bad enough to have lost them.

“Miss Bramble,” he said. “Please. I certainly wouldn’t pursue you, pursue your… your tale.” That wasn’t true. He was rapt before it. He must know it: know her heart. “You won’t be bothered here. You can rest.” He gestured toward the cedars of Lebanon he had planted in that careful lawn. The wind in them spoke in a childish gabble, faint presage of the great grave voice they would speak in when they were grown. “It’s safe here. I built it for that.”

And she did feel, despite the deep constraints of formality that seemed laid on her here, a kind of serenity. If it had all been a terrible error telling Father about them, if it had inflamed not settled his mind and sent the two of them out on the road like a pair of itinerant preachers, or a gypsy and his dancing bear more nearly, to make their living entertaining the mad and the obsessed in glum lecture-halls and meeting rooms (and counting afterwards their take, good Lord!) then rest and forgetfulness were the best issue it could have. Better than they could have expected. Only…

She rose, restless, unreconciled, and followed a radiating path toward a kind of stage-set wing of arches that protruded from a corner of the house. “I built it,” she heard him say, “for you really. In a way.”

She had passed through the arches and come around the corner of the house, and suddenly out of the plain pillared envelope of the wing a flowered valentine was unfolded and offered her, whitewashed and American, bright with flowerbeds and lacy with jigsaw work. It was a wholly different place; it was as though the severe face of Erasmus had tittered behind his hand. She laughed, the first time she had laughed since she had shut the wicket on her English garden forever.

He came almost at a run, grinning at her surprise. He tilted his straw hat on the back of his head and began to talk with animation about the house, about himself; the quick moods came and went in his big face. “Not usual, no,” he laughed, “not a thing about it’s usual. Like here: this was to be the kitchen-garden, you see, where anybody’d put a kitchen-garden, but I’ve filled it with flowers. The cook won’t garden, and the gardener’s a great one with flowers, but says he can’t keep a tomato alive…” He pointed with his bamboo walking-stick at a pretty, cut-out pumphouse—“Just like,” he said, “one my parents had in their garden, and useful too”—and then the pierced, ogee arches of the porch, which broad grape-leaves had begun to climb. “Hollyhocks,” he said, taking her to admire some that the bumblebees were engaged on. “Some people think hollyhocks are a weed. Not me.”

“ ’Ware heads, there!” called out a broad, Irish voice above them. A maid upstairs had flung open a window, and shook a dust mop in the sun.

“She’s a great girl,” Drinkwater said, indicating her with his thumb. “A great girl…” He looked down at Violet, dreamy again, and she up at him, as the dust-motes descended in the sun like Danae’s gold. “I suppose,” he said gravely, the bamboo stick swinging pendulum-fashion behind his back, “I suppose you think of me as old.”

“You mean you think that’s so.”

“I’m not, you know. Not old.”

“But you suppose, you expect…”

“I mean I think…”

“You’re supposed to say ‘I guess,’ ” she said, stamping her small foot and raising a butterfly from the sweet William. “Americans always say ‘I guess,’ don’t they?” She put on a bumpkin basso: “I guess it’s time to bring the cows in from the pasture. I guess there’ll be no taxation without representation.—Oh, you know.” She bent to smell flowers, and he bent with her. The sun beat down on her bare arms, and as though tormenting them made the garden insects hum and buzz.

“Well,” he said, and she could hear the sudden daring in his voice. “I guess, then. I guess I love you, Violet. I guess I want you to stay here always. I guess…”

She fled from him along the flagged garden path, knowing that next he would take her in his arms. She fled around the next corner of the house. He let her go. Don’t let me go, she thought.

What had happened? She slowed her steps, finding herself in a dark valley. She had come behind the shadow of the house. A sloping lawn fell away down to a noiseless stream, and just across the stream a sudden hill arose straight up, piney and sharp like a quiver of arrows. She stopped amid the yew trees planted there; she didn’t know which way to turn. The house beside her was as gray as the yews, and as dreary. Plump stone pillars, oppressive in their strength, supported flinty stringcourses that seemed purposeless, covert. What should she do?

She glimpsed Drinkwater then, his white suit a paleness loitering within the stone cloister; she heard his boots on the tiles of it. In a change, the wind pointed the yews’ branches toward him, but she wouldn’t look that way, and he, abashed, said nothing; but he came closer.

“You mustn’t say those things,” she said to the dark Hill, not turning to him. “You don’t know me, don’t know…”

“Nothing I don’t know matters,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, “oh…” She shivered, and it was his warmth that caused it; he had come up behind her, and covered her now with his arms, and she leaned against him and his strength. They walked on together thus, down to where the full-charged stream ran foaming into a cave’s mouth in the hillside and was lost. They could feel the cave’s damp and stony breath; he held her closer, protecting her from what seemed the cold infection of it that made her shiver. And from within the circle of his arms she told him, without tears, all her secrets.

“Do you love him, then?” Drinkwater said when she had done. “The one who did this to you?” It was his eyes that were bright with tears.

“No. I didn’t, ever.” It had never till this moment mattered. Now she wondered what would hurt him more, that she loved the one who had done this to her or did not (she wasn’t even absolutely certain which one it was, but he would never, never know that). Sin pressed on her. He held her like forgiveness.

“Poor child,” he said. “Lost. But no more. Listen to me now. If…” He held her at arm’s length, to look into her face; the single eyebrow and the thick lashes seemed to shutter it. “If you could accept me… You see, no stain on you can make me think less of you; I’d still be unworthy. But if you could, I swear the child will be raised here, one of mine.” His face, stern with resolve, softened. He almost smiled. “One of ours, Violet. One of many.”

Now at last the tears came to her eyes, wondering tears at his goodness. She hadn’t before thought of herself as in terrible trouble; now he had offered to save her from it. What goodness! Father had hardly noticed.

Lost, though, yes; that she knew herself to be. And could she find herself here? She left his touch again, and went around the next corner of the house, beneath beetling arcades grotesquely carved and thick castellations. The white ribbons of her hat, which she held now in her hand, trailed across the damp emerald grass. She could sense him following at a respectful distance.

“Curious,” she said out loud when she had rounded the corner. “How very curious.”

The stonework of the house had changed from grim gray to cheerful brickwork in eye-intriguing shades of red and brown, with pretty enamel plaques set here and there, and white woodwork. All the Gothic heaviness had been stretched, pulled, pointed, and exploded into deep-curving, high-sweeping eaves, and comical chimney pots, and fat useless towers, and exaggerated curves of stacked and angled brick. It was as though—and here the sun shone again too, picking out the brickwork, and winking at her—it was as though the dark porch and soundless stream and dreaming yews had all been a joke.

“What it is,” Violet said when John, hands behind his back, came up to her, “is many houses, isn’t it?”

“Many houses,” he said, smiling. “Every one for you.”

Through a silly piece of cloistery archwork she could see a bit of Father’s back. He was still ensconced in his wicker chair, still looking out through the curtain of wisteria, presumably still seeing the avenue of sphinxes and the cedars of Lebanon. But from here, his bald head could be a dreaming monk’s in a monastery garden. She began to laugh. You will wander, and live in many houses. “Many houses!” She took John Drinkwater’s hand; she almost kissed it; she looked up laughing at his face, that seemed just then to be full of pleasant surprises.

“It’s a great joke!” she said. “Many jokes! Are there as many houses inside?”

“In a sense,” he said.

“Oh, show me!” She pulled him toward the white arched door that was hinged with neat brass Gothic e’s. In the sudden darkness of the brief, painted vestibule within, she lifted his big hand to her lips in an access of gratitude.

Beyond the vestibule, there was a vision of doorways, long lists of arches and lintels through which underscorings of light were painted by unseen windows.

“However do you find your way about?”Violet asked, on the threshold of all this.

“Sometimes I don’t, in fact,” he said. “I proved that every room needed more than two doors, but couldn’t ever prove that any could get along with only three.” He waited, unwilling to hurry her.

“Perhaps,” she said, “one day, you’ll be thinking of such a thing, and not be able to get out at all.”

Hands on the walls and going slowly, as though she were blind (but in fact only marveling), Violet Bramble stepped into the pumpkin-shell John Drinkwater had made to keep her in, which he had first transformed into a golden coach for her delight.

Tell Me the Tale

After moonrise Violet awoke in a large and unfamiliar bedroom, feeling the pressure of cold light and the sound of her name called. She lay deathly still for a long moment on the tall bed, holding her breath, waiting for the tiny call to come again; but it didn’t come. She threw off the coverlet and climbed down from the tall bed and across the floor. When she opened the casement she thought she heard her name again.

Violet?

Summer odors invaded the room, and a host of small noises from which she couldn’t sort out the voice, if it was one, that had called her, if it had. She pulled her big cloak from the steamer trunk which had been put in her room, and quickly, quietly left the room on the balls of her feet. Her white calico nightgown billowed in the stale air which came searching up the stairways for the window she had left open.

“Violet?”

But that was only her father, perhaps asleep, as she passed his room, and she didn’t answer.

It took some time of cautious creeping (feet growing cold on the uncarpeted stairs and halls) to find which way went down and out. And when at last she found a door flanked by windows which showed the night, she realized she had no idea which way she was faced. Did it matter?

It was that grand, still garden. The sphinxes watched her pass, their identical faces mobile in the aqueous moonlight. A frog spoke from the fishpond’s edge, but not her name. She went on, across the spectral bridge and through a screen of poplars like frightened heads of hair on end. Beyond was a field, crossed by a kind of hedge, not a proper hedge, a line of bushes and small sighing trees, and the piled stones of a crude wall. She followed this, not knowing where she was going, feeling (as Smoky Barnable would years hence) that she may not have left Edgewood at all, only turned down some new illusory outdoor corridor of it.

She went what seemed a long way. The hedge beings, rabbits and stoats and hedgehogs (did they have such creatures here?) didn’t speak, but they have no voices, or don’t use them, she didn’t know which. Her naked feet were cold at first in the dew, then numb; she drew the cloak over her nose, though it was a mild night, for the moonlight seemed to chill her.

Then, without knowing which foot had taken the step or when, she began to feel she was in familiar places. She looked up at the moon, and could tell by its smile that she was somewhere she had never been but knew, somewhere elsewhere. Ahead the sedgy, flower-starred meadow rose up to a knoll, and there grew an oak tree and a thorn together, in deep embrace, inseparable. She knew, her feet quickening and her heart too, that there would be a path around the knoll, and it would lead to a small house built underside.

“Violet?”

Lamplight shone from its round window, and a brass face on the round door held a knocker in its teeth. But the door opened as she came to it: no need to knock.

“Mrs. Underhill,” she said, trembling between joy and hurt, “why didn’t you tell me this is how it was to be?”

“Come in, child, and ask me not; if I’d known more than I said I’d have said it.”

“I thought,” Violet said, and for a moment couldn’t speak, couldn’t say that she had thought never to see her, never to see any of them again, not a single glowing person in the gloom of the garden, not one small secret face sipping at the honeysuckle. The roots of oak and thorn that made Mrs. Underhill’s house were lit by her little lamp, and when Violet raised her eyes to them and sighed a long shuddering sigh to keep from weeping, she inhaled the black odor of their growing. “But how…” she said.

Tiny, bent Mrs. Underhill, who was mostly shawl-bound head and great slippered feet, raised an admonitory finger as long almost as the needles she knitted with. “Don’t ask me how,” she said. “But there it is.”

Violet sat at her feet, all questions answered or at least not mattering any more. Only—“You might have told me,” she said, her eyes starred with happy tears,” that all the houses I’m to live in are one house.”

“Are they,” Mrs. Underhill said. She knitted and rocked. The scarf of many colors between her needles grew quickly longer. “Time past, time to come,” she said comfortably. “Somehow the Tale gets told.”

“Tell me the Tale,” Violet said.

“Ah, if I could I would.”

“Is it too long?”

“Longer than any. Why, child, they’ll have put you long beneath the earth, and your children, and your children’s children, before that Tale’s all told.” She shook her head. “That’s common knowledge.”

“Does it have,” Violet asked, “a happy ending?” She’d asked all this before; these weren’t questions, but exchanges, as though she and Mrs. Underhill passed back and forth, with compliments, the same gift: each time expressing surprise and gratitude.

“Well, who’s to say,” Mrs. Underhill said. The scarf grew longer, row by row. “It’s a Tale, is all. There are only short ones and long ones. Yours is the longest I know.” Something, not a cat, began to unravel Mrs. Underhill’s fat ball of yam. “Stop that, bold thing!” she said, and beat at it with a knitting needle she drew from behind her ear. She shook her head at Violet. “Not a moment’s peace in centuries.”

Violet got up and cupped her hand to Mrs. Underhill’s ear. Mrs. Underhill leaned close, grinning, ready for secrets.

“Are they listening?” Violet whispered.

Mrs. Underhill put her fingers to her lips. “I think not,” she said.

“Then tell me truly,” Violet said. “How do you come to be here?”

Mrs. Underhill started in surprise. “I?” she said. “Whatever do you mean, child? I’ve been here all the time. It’s you who’ve been in motion.” She took up her whispering needles. “Use your sense.” She leaned back in her rocker; something caught beneath the tread shrieked, and Mrs. Underhill grinned maliciously.

“Not a moment’s peace,” she said, “in centuries.”

All Questions Answered

After his marriage, John Drinkwater began to retire, or retreat, more and more from an active life in architecture. The buildings he would have been called on to build came to seem to him at once heavy, obtuse, and lifeless, and at the same time ephemeral. He remained with the firm; he was constantly consulted, and his ideas and exquisite initial sketches (when reduced to ordinariness by his partners and their teams of engineers) continued to alter the cities of the east, hut they were no longer his life’s work.

There were other schemes to occupy him. He designed a folding bed of astonishing ingenuity, in effect an entire bedroom disguised as or contained within a sort of wardrobe or armoire, which in a moment—a quick motion of brass catches and levers, a shift of heavy counterweighting—became the bed which made the bedroom a bedroom. He enjoyed that idea, a bedroom within the bedroom, and even patented his scheme, hut the only buyer he ever found was his partner Mouse, who (chiefly as a favor) installed a few in his City apartments. And then there was the Cosmo-Opticon: he spent a happy year working on this with his friend the inventor Henry Cloud, the only man John Drinkwater had ever known who could actually sense the spin of the earth on its axis and its motion around the sun. The Cosmo-Opticon was an enormous, hideously expensive stained-glass-and-wrought- iron representation of the Zodiacal heavens and their movement, and the movement of the planets within them. And it did move: its owner could sit within it on a green plush seat, and as great weights fell and clockwork ticked over, the dome of many-colored glass would move just as the heavens did in their apparent motion. It was a measure of Drinkwater’s abstraction that he thought there would be a ready market for this strange toy among the wealthy.

And yet—strange—no matter how he removed himself from the world, no matter how he poured the rich gains of his working life into such schemes, he flourished; his investments turned over at a great rate, his fortune only increased.

Protected, Violet said. Taking tea at the stone table he had placed to overlook the Park, John Drinkwater looked up at the sky. He had tried to feel protected. He had tried to repose himself within the protection she was so certain of, and to laugh at the world’s weather from within it. But in his heart he felt unsheltered, bare-headed, abroad.

In fact, as he grew older, he became more and more concerned with the weather. He collected almanacs scientific and not so, and he studied the daily weather surmise in his paper though it was the divination of priests he didn’t entirely trust—he only hoped, without having reason to, that they were right when they read the omens Fair and wrong when they read them Foul. He watched the summer sky especially, could feel as a burden on his own back any far-off cloud that might obscure the sun, or that might bring others after it. When fluffy harmless cumulus trod the sky like sheep, he was at ease but watchful. They could combine suddenly into thunderheads, they could drive him indoors to listen to the dull fall of rain on his roofs.

(As they seemed just now to be doing, over in the west, and he powerless to stop them. They drew his eye, and each time he looked they were piled that much higher. The air was dense and palpable. There was then little hope that rain and storm would not begin soon. He was not reconciled.)

In the winter, he wept often; in the spring he was desperately impatient, rageful when he found heaps of winter still piled in the corners of April. When Violet spoke of spring she meant a time of flowers and baby animals—a notion. A single clear day in April was like what she had in mind, he supposed. Or May, rather, because it had become clear to him that her idea of the qualities of months differed from his: hers were English months, Februaries when the snow melted and Aprils when flowers burst, not the months of this harsher exile place. May, there, was like June here. And no experience of these American months could change her mind: or even reach it, he sometimes thought.

Perhaps that conspiracy of cloud on the horizon was stationary, a kind of decoration merely, like the high-piled clouds behind country scenes in his children’s picture books. But the air around him belied that: laden and sparkling with change.

Violet thought (or did she?—he spent hours grappling with her cryptic remarks, with Dr. Bramble’s elaborate explications for a guide, and yet he wasn’t sure) that it was always spring There., But spring is a change only. All seasons, collated into a string of fast-following days like changes of mood. Was that what she meant? Or did she mean the notional spring of young grass and newunfurled leaves, changeless single equinoctial day? There is no spring. Perhaps it was a joke. There would be precedent for that. He felt sometimes that all she said to his urgent inquiries was a joke. Spring is all seasons and no season. It’s always spring There. There is no There. A humid wave of despair washed over him: a thunder mood, he knew, and yet…

It wasn’t that he loved her less as they grew older (or rather as he grew older and she grew up); only that he lost that first wild certainty that she would lead him somewhere, a certainty that he had because for sure she had been there herself. He couldn’t, as it happened, follow. After a bitter year he knew that. Better years followed. He would be Purchas to her pilgrims: he would tell her journeys to the world, her traveler’s tall tales of marvels he would never see. She had intimated to him (he thought) that without the house he had built the whole Tale could not be told, that it was the beginning and perhaps the end, in some way, like the house that Jack built, cause of a chain. He didn’t understand, but he was satisfied.

And there was no time when (even after years, after three children, after who knows how much water under what crumbling bridges) his heart would not swell when she came up to him and put her small hands on him suddenly and whispered in his ear Go to bed, old Goat—Goat she called him for his shameless ceaselessness—and he would mount the stairs and await her.

And look what he possessed now, all framed against the vertiginous height of cloud forming.

Here were his daughters Timothea Wilhelmina and Nora Angelica come home from a swim. And his son (her son, his) Auberon stalking across the lawn with his camera as though seeking something to strike with it. And his baby August in a sailor suit, who had never smelled the sea. He had named him for that month when the year stands still and blue day follows blue day, when for a while he stopped looking at the sky. He looked at the sky now. The white clouds were being edged with somber gray, sagging like old men’s sad eyes. Yet still before him his shadow lay amid the shadows of leaves. He shook his newspaper and changed the way his legs were crossed. Enjoy, enjoy.

Among many other and odder beliefs, his father-in-law was sure that a man can’t think or feel clearly if he can see his own shadow. (He thought also that looking at oneself in the mirror immediately before retiring caused bad, or at least troubling, dreams.) He always sat in the shade or faced into the sun, as he now sat in the wrought-iron love seat by “The Syrinx” with a stick between his knees to rest his hairy hands on, and a gold chain glowing on his stomach as the sun played with it. August sat at his feet listening or perhaps only politely seeming to listen to the old man, whose voice reached Drinkwater as a murmur, one murmur among many, the cicadas, the lawn mower Ottolo pushed in widening circles, the piano in the music room where Nora was practicing now, her chords running together like tears down a cheek.

Gone, She Said

She liked mostly the feel of the keys beneath her fingers, liked the thought of them being solid ivory and ebony. “What are they made of?” “Solid ivory.” She stroked them in harmonic sets of six and eight at a time, no longer really practicing, only testing the plangency as her fingertips tested the smoothness. Her mother wouldn’t notice it was no longer Delius she was playing or trying to play, her mother had no ear, she said so herself, though Nora could see the shapely whorl of her mother’s ear where she sat cheek in hand at the drum table, playing her cards or looking at them anyway. For a moment her long earrings were still, till she looked up to take another card from the pile and everything moved, earrings shook, necklaces swung. Nora slid from her polished stool and came to stare at her mother’s work.

“You should go outside,” Violet said to her without looking up. “You and Timmie Willie should go down to the lake. It’s so hot.”

Nora didn’t say that she had just returned from there, because she had told her mother that already, and if she hadn’t understood then, there seemed no reason to insist on it. She only looked down at what her mother had laid out.

“Can you make a house of cards?” she asked.

“Yes,” Violet said, and went on looking. This way Violet had of seizing first not the most obvious sense of what people said to her but some other, interior echo or reverse side of it was a thing that baffled and frustrated her husband, who sought in her sybilline responses to ordinary questions some truth he was sure Violet knew but couldn’t quite enunciate. With his father-in-law’s help, he had filled volumes with his searchings. Her children, though, hardly noticed it. Nora shifted from foot to foot for a moment waiting for the promised structure, and when it didn’t appear forgot it. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed.

“Oh.” Violet looked up. “They must have had their tea already.” She rubbed her cheeks as though suddenly waking. “Why didn’t you say something? Let’s go see what’s left.”

She took Nora’s hand and they went to the French doors that led out to the garden. Violet picked up a wide hat that lay on the table there, hut stopped when she had it on, and stood looking out into the haze. “What is it in the air?” she said.

“Electricity,” Nora said, already crossing the patio. “That’s what Auberon says.” She squinted her eyes. “I can see it, all red and blue squiggles, when I do this. It means a storm.”

Violet nodded, and started across the lawn slowly, as though making progress through an unfamiliar element, to where her husband waved to her from the stone table. Auberon had just done taking a picture of Grandy and the baby, and now he brought his instrument toward the table, making a motion to gather his mother into his field of focus. He went about his picture-taking solemnly, as though it were duty not pleasure. She felt a sudden pity for him. This air!

She sat, and John poured her tea. Auberon put his camera before them. The vast cloud defeated the sun, and John looked up at it, resentful.

“Oh! Look!” Nora said.

“Look!” Violet said.

Auberon opened the camera’s eye, and closed it again.

“Gone,” Nora said.

“Gone,” Violet said.

The advancing edge of the occluded front swept invisibly across the lawn, stirring hair and turning lapels and leaves to show their pale undersides. It cut through the broken front of the house, lifting a card on the card-table and riffling the pages of five-finger exercises on the piano. It swung the tassels of scarves hung on sofas, it snapped the edges of drapes. Its cold oncoming wedge rose up through the second floor and the third and then thousands of feet into the air, where the rainmaker minted his first fat drops to throw on them.

“Gone,” August said.

All on a summer morning Smoky dressed himself to wed, in a white suit of yellowed linen or alpaca that his father had always said once belonged to Harry Truman, and there were the initials on the inside pocket, HST; it was only when he came to consider it for a wedding suit (old not new) that he realized the initials could after all stand for somebody else, and that his father had kept up the joke through his life and then perpetuated it beyond without cracking a smile. The sensation wasn’t unknown to Smoky. He had wondered if his education weren’t the same kind of posthumous fun (revenge on his betraying mother?) and though Smoky could take a joke, he did as he shot his cuffs at himself in the bathroom mirror feel a little at a loss and wish his father had given him some man-to-man advice on weddings and marriage. Barnable had hated weddings and funerals and christenings, and whenever one seemed imminent would pack socks, books, dog, and son and move on; Smoky had been to Franz Mouse’s wedding reception and danced with the starry-eyed bride, who made him a surprising suggestion; but that was a Mouse wedding after all and the couple were separated already. He knew there must be a Ring, and he patted his pocket where he had it; he thought there should be a Best Man, though when he wrote so to Daily Alice she wrote that they didn’t believe in that; and as for Rehearsals, she said when he mentioned them, “Don’t you want it to be a surprise?” The only other thing he was sure of was that he shouldn’t see his bride till she was led up the aisle (what aisle?) by her father. And so he wouldn’t, and didn’t peek in the direction he thought her room lay (he was wrong) when he went to the john. His walking shoes stuck out thick and unfestive from beneath his white cuffs.

A Suit of Truman’s

The wedding was to be “on the grounds,” he had been told, and Great-aunt Cloud, as oldest there, would conduct him to the place—a chapel, Smoky surmised, and Cloud with that surprised air said yes, she supposed that’s exactly what it was. It was she Smoky found waiting for him at the top of the stairs when at last he shyly emerged from the bathroom. What a comforting presence he found her, large and calm in a June dress with a bunch of late violets at her bosom and a walking-stick in her hand. Like him she wore hard shoes with a glum expression. “Very, very good,” she said, as though a hope had proved out for her; she held him at arm’s length and inspected him through blue-tinted glasses for a moment, and then offered him her arm to take.

The Summer House

“I think often of the patience of landscape gardeners,” Cloud said as they went through the knee-deep sedge of what she called the Park. “These great trees, some of them, my father planted as infants, only imagining the effect they would have, and knowing he would never live to see the whole. That beech—I could almost join hands around it when I was a girl. You know there are fashions in landscape gardening—immensely long fashions, since the landscapes take so long to grow. Rhododendrons—I called them rum-de-dum-dums when I was a child, helping the Italian men to plant these. The fashion passed. So difficult to keep them cut back. No Italian men to do it for us, so they grow jungly and—ouch!— watch your eyes here.

“The plan goes, you see. From where the walled garden is now you once looked out this way and there were Vistas—the trees were various, chosen for, oh, picturesqueness, they looked like foreign dignitaries conversing together at an embassy affair—and between them the lawns, kept down you know, and the flower-beds and fountains. It seemed that you would any moment see a hunting party appear, lords and ladies, hawks on their wrists. Look now! Forty years since it’s been properly cared for. You can still see the pattern, what it all was meant to look like, but it’s like reading a letter, a letter from oh a long time ago, that’s been left out in the rain and all the words have run together. I wonder if he grieves at it. He was an orderly man. See? The statue is ‘The Syrinx.’ How long till the vines pull it down, or the moles undermine it? Well. He would understand. There are reasons. One doesn’t want to disturb what likes it this way.”

“Moles and things.”

“The statue is only marble.”

“You could—ouch—pull up these thorn-trees, maybe.”

She looked at him as though, unexpectedly, he had struck her. She cleared her throat, patting her clavicle. “This is Auberon’s lane,” she said. “It leads to the Summer House. It’s not the directest way, but Auberon ought to see you.”

“Oh yes?”

The Summer House was two round red brick towers squat as great toes, with a machicolated foot between them. Was it intended to look ruined, or was it really ruined? The windows were out of scale, large and arched and cheerfully curtained. “Once,” Cloud said, “you could see this place from the house. It was thought, on moony nights, to be very romantic… Auberon is my mother’s son, though not my father’s—my half-brother, then. Some years older than I. He’s been our schoolmaster for many years, though he’s not well now, hasn’t been out of the Summer House much for, oh, a year? It’s a pity… Auberon!”

Closer now he could see the place had stretched out habitation’s hands around it, a privy, a neat vegetable garden, a shed from which a lawn mower peeked out ready to roll. There was a screen door, rhombic with age, for the central toothed entrance, and board steps at a slant, and a striped canvas sling-chair in the sun there by the birdbath, and a small old man in the chair who, when he heard his name called, jumped up or at least rose up in agitation—his suspenders seemed to draw him down into a crouch—and made for his house, but he was slow, and Cloud had come near enough to stop him. “Here’s Smoky Barnable, who’s going to marry Daily Alice today. At least come and say hello.” She shook her head for Smoky to see her patience was tried, and led him by the elbow into the yard.

Auberon, trapped, turned at the door with a welcoming smile, hand extended. “Well, welcome, welcome, hm.” He had the distracted chuckle of troubled old people who look within, keeping watch on failing organs. He took Smoky’s hand and almost before they touched sank again gratefully in his sling-chair, motioning Smoky to a bench. Why was it that within this enclosure Smoky felt a troubling of the sunlight? Cloud sat in a chair by her brother, and Auberon put his white-haired hand over hers. “Well, what’s happened?” she said indulgently.

“No need to say,” he said undertone, “not before…”

“Member of the family,” Cloud said. “As of today.”

Auberon, his throat still making soundless chuckles, looked at Smoky. Unprotected! That’s what Smoky felt. They had stepped into this yard and lost something they had had in the woods; they had stepped out of something. “Easy enough to test,” Auberon said, striking his bony knee and rising. He retreated into the house rubbing his fingers together.

“It’s not easy,” Cloud said to no one, looking up at the blank sky. She had lost a portion of her ease. She cleared her throat again, contemplated the gray birdbath, which was supported by a number of carved figures, gnomes or elves, with patient bearded faces, who seemed in the act of bearing it away. Cloud sighed. She glanced at a tiny gold watch that was pinned to her bosom. It had little curling wings on either side. Time flies. She looked at Smoky and smiled apologetically.

“Now, aha, aha,” Auberon said, coming out with a large, long-legged camera veiled with a black cloth. “Oh, Auberon” Cloud said, not impatiently but as though this weren’t necessary and anyway an enthusiasm she didn’t share; but he was already thrusting its spiked toes into the ground by Smoky, adjusting its tibiae to make it stand straight, and bending its mahogany face upon Smoky.

For years that last photograph of Auberon’s lay on a table in the Summer House, Auberon’s magnifying glass beside it; it showed Smoky, in his suit of Truman’s that glowed in the sunlight, his hair fiery, and half his face sun-struck and blind. There were Cloud’s dimpled elbow and ringed ear. The birdbath. The birdbath: could it be that one of those long soapstone faces had not before been there, that there was an arm too many supporting the garlanded bowl? Auberon didn’t complete the study, come to a decision; and when years later a son of Smoky’s blew the dust from the old image and took up Auberon’s work again it was still inconclusive, proving nothing, a silvered paper blackened by a long-past midsummer sun.

Woods and Lakes

Beyond the Summer House they descended a concave lane, quickly swallowed up in a wood tangled and somnolent, moist from the rain. It seemed the kind of wood grown to hide a sleeping princess till her hundred years were up. They hadn’t been long within it when there was a rustle or a whisper beside them, and with a suddenness that startled Smoky, a man stood on the path ahead of them. “Good morning, Rudy,” Cloud said. “Here’s the groom. Smoky, Rudy Flood.” Rudy’s hat looked as though it had been fought with, punched and pummelled; its upturned brim gave his broad bearded face an open look. Out of his open green coat a great belly came, tautening his white shirt. “Where’s Rory?” Cloud asked.

“Down the path.” He grinned at Smoky as though they shared a joke. Rory Flood his tiny wife appeared in a moment as he had, and a big girl in floppy jeans, big baby in her arms punching the air. “Betsy Bird,” Cloud said, “and Robin. And see here are Phil Fox and two cousins of mine, Stones, Irv and Walter. Clouds on their mother’s side.” More came on the path from right and left; the path was narrow, and the wedding guests walked it two by two, dropping back or moving up to handle Smoky and bless him. “Charles Wayne,” Cloud said. “Hannah Noon. Where are the Lakes? And the Woods?”

The path came out into a wide, sloping glade, the marge of a dark lake that still and moatlike surrounded an island where aged trees grew. Leaves floated flat on its surface, and frogs fled from their feet as they came down among its pools. “It’s certainly,” Smoky said remembering the guidebook, “an extensive estate.”

“The further in you go, the bigger it gets,” said Hannah Noon. “Have you met my boy Sonny?”

Across the lake a boat was coming, laying out lacquered ripples. Its carved prow was intended for a swan, but it was gray and eyeless now, like the dark swan on the dark lake of northern legend. It struck the bank with a hollow rattle of oarlocks, and Smoky was pushed forward to board with Cloud, who was still explaining who was who of the laughing wedding-guests. “Hannah’s distantly related,” she said. “Her grandfather was a Bush, and her grandfather’s sister married one of Mrs. Drinkwater’s uncles, a Dale…” She saw that he wasn’t listening, though his head was nodding mechanically. She smiled and put her hand on his. The lake island, shadowed by its trees, seemed made of changeful green glass; myrtle grew on its gentle slopes. At its center was a round gazebo, its pillars slim as arms, softly domed and greenly garlanded. There, a tall girl in white stood among others, holding a ribboned bouquet.

They were greeted and handed out of the leaking swan by many hands. Around the island people were sitting together, opening picnic baskets, placating shouting children; few of them seemed to notice Smoky’s arrival. “Look who we’ve got here, Cloud,” said a slim chinless man who made Smoky think of the poets the guidebook had disliked so much. “We’ve got Dr. Word. Where is he now? Doctor! Got some more champagne?” Doctor Word in a tight black suit had a look of unreasoning terror on his badly shaven face; his golden glassful trembled and bubbles rose. “Nice to see you, Doctor,” Cloud said. “I think we can promise no wonders. Oh, settle down, man!” Dr. Word had tried to speak, choked, spluttered. “Pound his back, someone. He’s not our minister,” Cloud said confidentially to Smoky. “They come from the outside, and tend to get very nervous. A wonder any of us is married or buried at all. Here’s Sarah Pink, and the little Pinks. How do you do. Ready?” She took Smoky’s arm, and as they went up the flagged path toward the gazebo a harmonium began to play, like a tiny weeping voice, music he didn’t know but that seemed to score him with sudden longing. At its sound the wedding-guests gathered, talking in low voices; when Smoky reached the low worn steps of the gazebo, Doctor Word had arrived there too, glancing around, fishing a book from his pocket; Smoky saw Mother, and Doctor Drinkwater, and Sophie with her flowers behind Daily Alice with hers; Daily Alice watched him unsmiling and calm, as though he were someone she didn’t know. They stood him beside her; he began to put his hands in his pockets, stopped, clasped them behind his back, then in front of him. Doctor Word fluttered the pages of his book and began to speak quickly, his words shot through with champagne and tremblings and the harmonium’s unceasing melody; it sounded like “Do you Barble take this Daily Alice to be your awful wedded life for bed or for worse insidious in stealth for which or for poor or to have unto whole until death you do part?” And he looked up inquiringly.

“I do,” Smoky said.

“I do too,” Daily Alice said.

“Wring,” Doctor Word said. “And now you pounce you, man on wife.”

Aaaah, said all the wedding guests, who then began to drift away, talking in low voices.

Touching Noses

There was a game she had played with Sophie in the long hallways of Edgewood, where she and Sophie would stand as far apart as was possible to get and still see each other. Then they would walk slowly together, slowly and deliberately, looking always each at the other’s face. They kept on, at the same pace, not laughing or trying not to, till their noses touched. It was like that with Smoky, though he had started far off, too far to be seen, coming from the City—no farther, out there where she had never been, far away, walking towards her. When the swan boat picked him up, she could easily cover him with her thumbnail if she chose to; then the boat drew closer, Phil Flowers hauling on the oars, and she could see his face, see that it was indeed he. At the water’s edge he was lost for a moment; then there was a murmur of expectation and appreciation around her and he reappeared, led by Cloud, much larger now, the new wrinkles visible at his knees, his strong veined hands she loved. Larger. There were violets in his buttonhole. She saw his throat move, and at that moment came Music. When he had come to the stairs of the pavilion she could no longer take in his feet if she looked resolutely at his face, and she did—for a moment everything around his face darkened and swam, his face orbited towards her like a pale smiling moon. He mounted the steps. He stood beside her. No touching noses. That would come. It might she thought take years; maybe they never would—their marriage was after all a Convenience, though she had never, would never, need not now ever explain that to him because, just as the cards had promised, she knew now she would choose him over anybody else, whether the cards chose him or not, or whether they who had promised someone like him to her thought he was unnecessary now or even wrong. She would defy them to have him. And it was they who had first seen fit to send her out to find him! She wanted with all her being to continue to find him now, to put her arms around him and search; but the stupid minister began to mutter—she felt anger at her parents who had thought him necessary, for Smoky’s sake they said, but she already knew Smoky better than that. She tried to listen to the man, thinking how much better it would be to marry touching noses: to proceed from great distances together till it was as in the old halls when the walls and pictures glided by changefully on the edge of vision but Sophie’s face kept constant, growing, the eyes widening, freckles expanding, a planet, then a moon, then a sun, then nothing at all visible except the onrushing map of it, the great eyes starting to cross at the last moment before their two noses rushed vastly headlong together to collide soundlessly.

Happy Isles

“A little unreal,” he said. There were grass stains on Truman’s suit, and Mother noted them with worry as she repacked a picnic basket. “They won’t come out,” she said. He drank champagne, which seemed to make the unreality acceptable, normal, even necessary; he sat in a haze like the lengthening afternoon’s, pacific and happy. Mother tied up the basket, and then saw a plate staring up at her from the grass; when the job had been all redone, Smoky with a sense of dejà vu pointed out a fork she hadn’t seen. Daily Alice linked her arm with his. They had been all over the island several times, seeing friends and relatives, being made much of. “Thank you,” several of them said when she presented Smoky, and when they gave her gifts. Smoky, after his third glass of champagne, wondered if this saying of things backwards (Cloud was always doing it) needn’t be looked at case by case, so to speak, but was in the way of a general, well, a general… She leaned her head on his padded shoulder, and the two of them supported each other, hello’d out. “Nice,” he said to no one. “What do they say when something’s outdoors?”

“Al fresco?”

“Is that it?”

“I think so.”

“Are you happy?”

“I think so.”

“I am.”

When Franz Mouse had been married, he and his bride (what was her name?) had gone together to a storefront photo studio. There, as well as the formal nuptial exposure, the photographer had thrown in a few goof pictures taken with props of his own: a papier-mâché ball-and-chain for Franz’s leg, a rolling pin he encouraged the bride to brandish over him. Smoky reflected that he knew just about that much of married life, and laughed aloud.

“What,” Alice inquired.

“Do you have a rolling pin?”

“You mean to roll out dough? I guess Mother does.”

“That’s all right, then.” He had the giggles now, the stream of laughter arising from a point in his diaphragm as the bubbles rose from an invisible point in his glass. She caught it from him. Mother, standing above them arms akimbo, shook her head at them. The harmonium or whatever it was began again, stilling them as though it had been a cool hand laid on them or a voice suddenly beginning to speak of some long-past sadness; he had never heard music like it, and it seemed to catch him, or rather he it, as though he were a rough thing drawn across the silk of it. It was a Recessional, he thought, not remembering how he knew the word; but it was a Recessional meant seemingly not for him and his bride, but for the others. Mother sighed a great sigh, having fallen momentarily silent as the whole island had; she picked up her picnic basket, motioned Smoky to sit still who had half-risen with deep reluctance to help her. She kissed them both and turned away smiling. Around the island others were going down to the water; there was laughter, and a far-off shout. At the water’s edge he saw pretty Sarah Pink helped into the swan boat, and others waiting to embark, depart, some holding glasses and one with a guitar over his shoulder; Ruby Flood flourished a green bottle. The music and the late afternoon charged their glad departure with melancholy, as though they left the Happy Isles for somewhere less happy, unable till they left to realize their loss,

Smoky stood his near-empty glass at a drunken angle in the grass, and feeling made of music head to foot, turned to lay his head in Daily Alice’s lap. In doing so, he happened to catch sight of Great-aunt Cloud at the lake’s margin speaking with two people he seemed to know but for a moment couldn’t identify, though he felt great surprise to see them there. Then the man made a fish’s mouth to puff on his pipe, and helped his wife into a rowboat.

Marge and Jeff Juniper.

He looked up into Daily Alice’s placid and certain face, wondering why every deepening of these daily mysteries left him less inclined to probe them. “The things that make us happy,” he said, “make us wise.”

And she smiled, and nodded, as who should say: yes, those old truths are really true.

A Sheltered Life

Sophie parted from her parents as they went arm in arm through the hushing wood, talking quietly to each other of what has been, as parents do whose eldest child has just been married. She took a path of her own, which went away uncertainly, eventually leading back the way they had come. Evening began to fall as she walked, though what it seemed to do was not fall but well up from the ground, beginning with the dense ferns’ velvet undersides turning black. Sophie could see day go from her hands; they became indistinct by degrees, and life then light went from the bunch of flowers she still for some reason carried. But she felt her head to be still above the rising dark, until the path before her grew obscure and she breathed an evening coolness, and was submerged. Evening next reached the birds where they sat, stilling bird by bird their furious battle-of-the-hands and leaving whispering silence in the middle air. Still the sky was as blue as noon, or nearly, though the path was so dark she stumbled, and the first firefly reported for work. She took off her shoes (bending her knee in mid-step and reaching behind her to pull off one by the heel, hopping a step, and taking off the other) and left them on a stone, hoping without giving it much thought that the dew would not spoil their satin.

She wanted not to hurry, though her heart against her will hurried anyway. Brambles implored her lacy dress to stay, and she thought of taking it off too, but did not. The wood, looked through lengthwise the way she went, was a tunnel of soft darkness, a perspective of fireflies; but when she looked out its less dense sides she could see a lapidary blue-gone-green horizon flawed by a pale brush of cloud. She could also see, unexpectedly (it was always unexpected) the top or tops of the house, far off and moving farther off—so it seemed as the air between grew hazier. She went on more slowly into the tunnel into evening, feeling a kind of laughter constrict her throat.

When she came close to the island, she began to feel Somehow accompanied, which was not wholly unexpected, but still it made her flush with sensitivity, as though she had fur and it had been brushed to crackling.

The island wasn’t really an island, or not quite one; it was teardrop-shaped, and the long tail of it reached up into the stream which fed the lake. Coming to it here, where the stream at its narrowest swept around the teardrop’s tail to swell and ripple the lake, she easily found a way to step from rock to rock that the water rushed over making silken water-pillows where it seemed she could lay her heated cheek.

She came onto the island, beneath the gazebo which stood abstracted, looking the other way.

Yes, they were around her in numbers now, their purpose, she couldn’t help but think, like hers: just to know or see or be sure. But their reasons surely must be different. She had no reasons that she could name, and perhaps their reasons had no names that could be spoken either, though she seemed to hear—doubtless only the stream and the blood sounding in her ears—a lot of voices speaking nothing. She went with care and great silence around the gazebo, hearing a voice, a human voice, Alice’s, but not what it said; and a laugh, and she thought she knew what it must be saying. Why had she come? Already she began to feel a horrid blind dark pressure at her heart, a wall of great weight building, but she went on and came to a higher place shielded by glossy bushes and a cold stone bench; there she knelt without a sound.

The last green light of evening went out. The gazebo, as though it had been waiting and watching for it, saw the gibbous moon pull itself above the trees and spill its light over the wrinkled water and through the pillars and onto the couple there.

Daily Alice had hung her white gown on the hands of a bush, and now and again its sleeve or hem would move in the breeze which began when the sun set; seeing it with a corner of his vision Smoky would think there was someone else near the gazebo where they lay. There were these lights then: darkening sky, fireflies, phosphorescent blossoms that seemed to shine not by reflection but by some mild inward light of their own. By them he could sense more than see her long geography beside him on the cushions.

“I’m really very innocent,” he said. “In lots of ways.”

“Innocent!” she said with false surprise (false because of course it was for that innocence that he was here now, and she with him). “You don’t act innocent.” She laughed, and so did he; it was the laugh Sophie heard. “Shameless.”

“Yes, that too. The same thing, I think. Nobody ever told me what to be ashamed of. Afraid of—they don’t have to teach that. But I got over that.” With you, he might have said. “I’ve had a sheltered life.”

“Me too,”

Smoky thought that his life had been not sheltered at all, not when Daily Alice could say the same thing about hers. If hers were sheltered, his was naked—and that’s how it felt to him. “I never had a childhood… not like you had. In a way I never was a child. I mean I was a kid, but not a child…”

“Well,” she said, “you can have mine then. If you want it.”

“Thank you,” he said; and he did want it, all of it, no second left ungarnered. “Thank you.”

The moon rose, and by its sudden light he saw her rise too, stretch herself as though after labor, and go to lean against a pillar, stroking herself absently and looking across to the massed darkness of the trees across the lake. Her long thews were silvered and insubstantial (though they were not insubstantial; no; he was still trembling slightly from their pressure). Her arm up along the pillar drew up her breast and the blade of her shoulder. She rested her weight on one long leg, locked back tensely; the other bent. The twin fullnesses of her nates were thus set and balanced like a theorem. All this Smoky noted with an intense precision, not as though his senses took it in, but as though they rushed toward it endlessly.

“My earliest memory,” she said, as though in down payment on the gift she had offered him, or maybe thinking of something else entirely (though he took it anyway), “my earliest memory is of a face in my bedroom window. It was night, in summer. The window was open. A yellow face, round and glowing. It had a wide smile and sort of penetrating eyes. It was looking at me with great interest. I laughed, I remember, because it was sinister but it was smiling, and made me want to laugh. Then there were hands on the sill, and it seemed the face, I mean the owner of it, was coming in the window. I still wasn’t scared, I heard laughter and I laughed too. Just then my father came in the room, and I turned away, and when I looked again the face wasn’t there. Later on when I reminded Daddy about it, he said that the face was the moon in the window; and the hands on the sill were the curtains moving in the breeze; and that when I looked back a cloud had covered the moon.”

“Probably.”

“It’s what he saw.”

“I mean probably…”

“Whose childhood,” she said turning to him, her hair afire with moonlight and her face matte and blue and for a moment frighteningly not hers, “is it that you want to have?”

“I want to have yours. Now.”

“Now?”

“Come here.”

She laughed, and came to kneel with him on the cushions, her flesh cooled now by moonlight but no less wholly her flesh for that.

As Quietly As She Had Come

Sophie saw them coupling. She felt with intense certainty what moods Smoky made come and go in her sister, though they were not the moods she had known Daily Alice to feel before. She saw clearly what it was to make her sister’s brown eyes grow dense and inward, or leap to light: saw it all. It was as though Daily Alice were made of some dark glass which had always been partly opaque, but now, held up before the bright lamp of Smoky’s love, became wholly transparent, so that no detail of Alice could be hidden from her as she watched them. She heard them speak—a few words only, directions, triumphs—and each word rang like a crystal bell. She breathed her sister’s breath, and at each quickening of it Alice was fired further with distinctness. Strange way to possess her, and Sophie couldn’t tell if the breath-robbing heat she felt at it were pain, or daring, or shame, or what. She knew that no force could make her look away; and that if she did she would still see, and just as clearly.

And yet all this time Sophie was asleep.

It was the sort of sleep (she knew every kind, but had no name for any one) in which it seems your eyelids have grown transparent, and you look through them at the scene you saw befcre they closed. The same scene, but not the same. She had, before her eyes closed, known or felt anyway that there were others around come also to spy on this marriage. Now in her dream they were quite concrete; they looked over her shoulders and her head, they crept with cunning to be near the gazebo, they lifted atomies of children above the myrtle leaves to see the wonder of it. They hung in the air on panting wings, wings panting in the same exaltation as that which they witnessed. Their murmuring didn’t disturb Sophie, for their interest, as intense as hers, was in nothing else like it; while she felt herself braving deeps, not certain she would not drown in contrary tides of wonder, passion, shame, suffocating love, she knew that those around her were urging those two—no, cheering them on— to one thing only, and that thing was Generation.

A clumsy beetle rattled past her ear, and Sophie woke.

The living things around her were dim analogs of those in her dream: murmuring gnats and glinting glowworms, a distant nightjar, hunting bats on rubber wings.

Far off, the gazebo was white and secret in the moonlight. She thought she could see, at moments, what might be the movements of their limbs. But no sound; no actions that could be named, or even guessed at. A stillness utterly private.

Why did it cut her more deeply than what she dreamed she had witnessed?

Exclusion. But she felt immolated between them as surely now when she could not see them as when she dreamed she could; was as uncertain she would survive it.

Jealousy: a waking jealousy. No, not that either. She had never been conscious of owning so much as a pin, and you can be jealous only when what is yours is taken. Nor betrayal either: she had known all from the start (and knew more now than they would ever know she knew); and you can only be betrayed by the false, by liars.

Envy. But of Alice, or Smoky, or both?

She couldn’t tell. She only felt that she glowed with pain and love at once, as though she had eaten live coals for sustenance.

As quietly as she had come she went, and numbers of others presumably after her even more quietly.

Suppose One Were a Fish

The stream that fed the lake fell down a long stony distance like a flight of stairs from a broad pool carved by a tall waterfall high up within the woods.

Spears of moonlight struck the silken surface of that pool, and were bent and shattered in the depths. Stars lay on it, rising and falling with the continual arc of ripples which proceeded from the foamy falls. So it would appear to anyone at the pool’s edge. To a fish, a great white trout almost asleep within, it seemed very different.

Asleep? Yes, fish sleep, though they don’t cry; their fiercest emotion is panic, the saddest a kind of bitter regret. They sleep wide-eyed, their cold dreams projected on the black and green interior of the water. To Grandfather Trout it seemed that the living water and its familiar geography were being shuttered and revealed to him as sleep came and went; when the pool was shuttered, he saw inward interiors. Fish-dreams are usually about the same water they see when they’re awake, but Grandfather Trout’s were not. So utterly other than trout-stream were his dreams, yet so constant were the reminders of his watery home before his lidless eyes, that his whole existence became a matter of supposition. Sleepy suppositions supplanted one another with every pant of his gills.

Suppose one were a fish. No finer place to live than this. Falls continually drowning air within the pool so that it was a pleasure simply to breathe. Like (supposing one were not a waterbreather) the high, fresh, wind-renewed air of an alpine meadow. Wonderful, and thoughtful of them so to provide for him, supposing that they thought of his or anyone’s happiness or comfort. And here were no predators, and few competitors, because (though a fish couldn’t be supposed to know it) the stream above was shallow and stony and so was the stream below, so that nothing approaching him in size came into the pool to contest with him for the constant fall of bugs from the dense and various woods which overhung. Really, they had thought of everything, supposing they thought of anything.

Yet (supposing that it was not his choice at all to be a swimmer here) how condign and terrible a punishment, bitter an exile. Mounted in liquid glass, unable to breathe, was he to make back-and-forth forever, biting at mosquitoes? He supposed that to a fish that taste was the toothsome matter of his happiest dreams. But if one were not a fish, what a memory, the endless multiplication of those tiny drops of bitter blood.

Suppose on the other hand (supposing one had hands) that it was all a Tale. That however truly a satisfied fish he might appear to be, or however reluctantly accustomed to it he had become, that once-on-a-time a fair form would appear looking down into the rainbow depths, and speak words she had wrested from malign secret-keepers at great cost to herself, and with a strangulating rush of waters he would leap—legs flailing and royal robes drenched—to stand before her panting, restored, the curse lifted, the wicked fairy weeping with frustration. At the thought a sudden picture, a colored engraving, was projected before him on the water: a bewigged fish in a high-collared coat, a huge letter under his arm, his mouth gaping open. In air. At this nightmare image (from where?) his gills gasped and he awoke momentarily; the shutters shot back. All a dream. For a while he gratefully supposed nothing but sane and moonshot water.

Of course (the shutters began to drift closed again) it was possible to imagine he was one of them, himself a secret-keeper, curse-maker, malign manipulator; an eternal wizard intelligence housed for its own subtle purposes in a common fish. Eternal: suppose it to be so: cetainly he has lived forever or nearly, has survived into this present time (supposing (drifting deeper) this to be the present time); he has not expired at a fish’s age, or even at a prince’s. It seems to him that he extends backwards (or is it forwards?) without beginning (or is it end?) and he can’t just now remember whether the great tales and plots which he supposes he knows and forever broods on lie in the to-come or lie dead in the has-been. But then suppose that’s how secrets are kept, and age-long tales remembered, and unbreakable curses made too…

No. They know. They don’t suppose. He thinks of their certainty, the calm, inexpressive beauty of their truth-telling faces and task-assigning hands, as unrefuseable as a hook deep in the throat. He is as ignorant as a fingerling; knows nothing; he wouldn’t care to know—wouldn’t care to ask them, even supposing (another inward window slides open silently) they would answer, whether on a certain night in August a certain young man. Standing on these rocks which lift their dry brows into the perishing air. A young man struck by metamorphosis as this pool was once struck by lightning. For presumably some affront, you have your reasons, don’t get me wrong, it’s nothing to do with me. Only suppose this man imagines remembering, imagines his only and final memory to be (the rest, all the rest, is supposition) the awful strangulated gasping in deadly waterlessness, the sudden fusing of arms and legs, the twisting in air (air!) and then the horrible relief of the plunge into cold, sweet water where he ought to be—must now be forever.

And suppose he cannot now remember why it happened: only supposes, dreaming, that it did.

What was it he did to hurt you so?

Was it only that the Tale required some go-between, some maquereau, and he came close enough to be seized?

Why can’t I remember my sin?

But Grandfather Trout is deep asleep now, for he could not suppose any of this if he were not. All shutters are shut before his open eyes, the water is all around and far away. Grandfather Trout dreams that he’s gone fishing.

V.

The next morning, Smoky and Daily Alice assembled packs more complete than Smoky’s City pack had been, and chose knobbed sticks from an urn full of walking-sticks, umbrellas, and so on that stood in the hail. Doctor Drinkwater gave them guides to the birds and the flowers, which in the end they didn’t open; and they took along also George Mouse’s wedding present, which had arrived that morning in the mail in a package marked Open Elsewhere and would turn out to be (as Smoky hoped and expected) a big handful of crushed brown weed odorous as a spice.

Lucky Children

Everyone gathered on the porch to see them off, making suggestions as to where they should go and whom of those that hadn’t been able to get to the wedding they ought to visit. Sophie said nothing, but as they were turning to go, she kissed them both firmly and solemnly, Smoky especially as if to say So there, and then took herself quickly away.

While they were gone, Cloud intended to follow them by means of her cards, and report, insofar as she could, on their adventures, which she supposed would be small and numerous and just the kind of thing these cards of hers had always been best for discovering. So after breakfast she drew the glass table near the peacock chair on that porch, and lit a first cigarette of the day, and composed her thoughts.

She knew that first they would climb the Hill, but that was because they said they would. She saw with the mind’s eye the way they went up over the well-trodden paths to the top, to stand there then and look out over morning’s domain and theirs: how it stretched green, forested and farmed across the county’s heart. Then they would go down the wilder far side to walk the marches of the land they had looked at.

She laid down cups and wands, squires of coins and kings of swords. She guessed that Smoky would be falling behind Alice’s long strides as they crossed the sun-whitened pastures of Plainfield; there Rudy Flood’s brindled cows would look up at them with lashy eyes, and tiny insects would leap from their footfalls.

Where would they rest? Perhaps by the quick stream that bites into that pasture, undermining the upholstered tussocks and raising infant willow groves by its sides. She laid the trump called the Bundle within the pattern and thought: Time for lunch.

In the pale tigery shade of the willow-grove they lay fulllength looking into the stream and its complex handiwork in the bank. “See already,” she said, chin in hands. “Can’t you see apartments, river-houses, esplanades or whatever? Whole ruined palaces? Balls, banquets, visiting?” He stared with her into the fretwork of weed, root, and mud which striped sunlight reached into without illuminating. “Not now,” she said, “but by moonlight. I mean isn’t that when they come out to play? Look.” Eye level with the bank, it was just possible to imagine. He stared hard, knitting his brows. Make-believe. He’d make an effort.

She laughed, getting up. She donned her pack again that made her breasts stand. “We’ll follow the brook up,” she said. “I know a good place.”

So through the afternoon they went up and slowly out of the valley, which the gurgling stream in malapert pride had taken over from some long-dead great river. They drew closer to fcrest, and Smoky wondered if this were the wood Edgewood is on the edge of. “Gee, I don’t know,” Alice said. “I never thought about it.”

“Here,” she said at last, wet and breathless from the long climb up. “This is a place we used to come to.”

It was like a cave cut in the wall of the sudden forest. The crest they stood on fell away down into it, and he thought he had never looked into anywhere so deeply and secretly The Wood as this. For some reason its floor was carpeted with moss, not thick with the irregulars of the forest’s edge, shrub and briar and small aspen. It led inward, it drew them inward into whispering darkness where the big trees groaned intermittently.

Within, she sat gratefully. The shade was deep, and deepened as the afternoon perceptibly passed. It was as still and as stilling as a church, with the same inexplicable yet reverent noises from nave, apse, and choir.

“Did you ever think,” Alice said, “that maybe trees are alive like we are, only just more slowly? That what a day is to us, maybe a whole summer is to them—between sleep and sleep, you know. That they have long, long thoughts and conversations that are just too slow for us to hear.” She laid aside her stick and slid one by one the pack-straps from her shoulders; her shirt was stained where she had worn them. She drew up her big knees glossy with sweat and rested her arms on them. Her brown wrists were wet too, and damp dust was caught in their golden hair. “What do you think?” She began to pluck at the heavy thongs of her high-top shoes. He said nothing, only took all this in, too pleased to speak. It was like watc.hing a Valkyrie disarm after battle.

When she knelt up to force down her creased, constricting shorts he came to help.

By the time Mother snapped on the yellow bulb above Cloud’s head, changing her card-dream from evening blue to something harsh and not quite intelligible, she had discerned what most of her cousins’ journey might be like in the days to come, and she said: “Lucky children.”

“You’ll go blind out here,” Mother said. “Dad’s poured you a sherry.”

“They’ll be all right,” Cloud said, shutting up the cards and getting up with some difficulty from the peacock chair.

“They did say, didn’t they, that they’d stop in at the Woods’.”

“Oh, they will,” Cloud said. “They will.”

“Listen to the cicadas still going,” Mother said. “No relief.”

She took Cloud’s arm and they went in. They spent that evening playing cribbage with a polished folding board, one missing ivory peg replaced with a matchstick; they listened to the knock and rasp of great stupid June bugs against the screens.

Some Final Order

In the middle of the night Auberon awoke in the summer house and decided he would get up and begin to put his photographs in order: some final order.

He didn’t sleep much anyway, and was beyond the age when getting up in the night to do some task seemed inappropiate or vaguely immoral. He had lain a long time listening to his heart, and grown bored with that, and so he found his spectacles and sat up. It was hardly night anyway; Grady’s watch said three o’clock, yet the six squares of the window were not black but faintly blue. The insects seemed asleep; in not too long the birds would begin. For the moment though it was quite still.

He pumped up the pressure lamp, his chest wheezing each time he drove in the plunger. It was a good lamp, looked just like a lamp, with a pleated paper shade and blue Delft ice skaters around its base. Needed a new mantle, though. Wouldn’t get one. He lit it, turned it down. Its long hiss was comforting. Almost as soon as it was lit it began to sound as though it were running down, but in fact it would continue running down for a long time. He knew the feeling.

It wasn’t that the photographs were in no order. In fact he spent much of his time with their ordering. But he always felt that their own order, which wasn’t chronological, or by size, or by some description of subjects, had always escaped him. They seemed to him sometimes individual frames taken from a motion picture, or several motion pictures, with lacunae long or short between the frames he had; and that if they were filled in, they would make scenes: long, story-telling pans, various and poignant. But how was he to tell if he had constituted even the frames he had aright, since so many others were missing? He always hesitated to disturb the after all quite rational cross-referenced order he did have in order to discover some other that might not be there at all.

He took out a portfolio labeled Contacts, 1911-1915. They were, though the label didn’t specify it, his earliest pictures. There had been others, of course, early failures that he had destroyed. In those days, as he never tired of saying, photography was like a religion. A perfect image was like a gift of grace, but sin would always be swiftly punished. A sort of Calvinist dogma, where you never knew when you were right, but must be constantly vigilant against error.

Here now was Nora on the whitewashed porch of the kitchen, in creased white skirt and shirt. Her scuffed high-top shoes seemed too large for her. White cotton, white porch-pillars, darkness of her summer skin, fairness of her summer hair, her eyes startlingly pale from the shadowless brightness that fills whitewashed porches on sunny days. She was (he looked at the date on the picture’s back) twelve. No, eleven.

Nora, then. Was there a way to begin with Nora (where his pictures began although of course the plot might not) and follow her, going away from her as a mOtion picture might when some other entered the frame, and follow that one?

Timmie Willie, for instance, and here she was by the X-gate that led out of the Park in that same summer, perhaps on that same day. Not quite sharp, for she would never be still. She was probably talking, telling where she was going, while he said Keep still. There was a towel in her hand: swimming. Hang your clothes on the hickory limb. It was a fine clear image, except that wherever the sun struck something, it flared: the weeds flamed whitely, one shoe of hers shone, the rings burned that she loved to wear even at that age. Hussy.

Which had he loved more?

Hung from Timmie Willie’s wrist by a black strap was the small, leather-bound Kodak he let them borrow. Be careful with it, he told them. Don’t break it. Don’t open it up to look inside. Don’t get it wet.

He traced with a forefinger Timmie Willie’s single eyebrow, denser in this picture even than it had been in life, and suddenly missed her desperately. As though riffled by some inward dealer a deck of later pictures passed through his mind. Timmie Willie posed in winter at the frosty window of the music room. Timmie and Nora and tall Harvey Cloud and Alex Mouse in the dawn on a butterfly expedition, Alex wearing plus-fours and a hangover. Nora with dog Spark. Nora a bridesmaid at Timmie and Alex’s wedding. Alex’s roadster and glad Timmie standing in it waving, holding its canted windshield and wearing the most hopeful of ribboned hats. And in time Nora and Harvey Cloud married with Timmie present looking already pale and wasted, he blamed the City; and then gone, not seen again; the moving camera must pass and follow others.

Montage, then: but how was he to explain Timmie Willie’s sudden absenèe from these groups of faces and festivals? His first pictures seemed to lead him right through his entire collection, branching and proliferating; and yet there was no way for any single picture to tell its whole story without a thousand words of explanation.

He thought wildly of printing them all on lantern-slides, and packing them together, packing more and more until their stained darknesses overlapped and nothing at all could be seen, no light came through: yet it would all be there.

No. Not all.

For there was another divergence it could take, symmetrical dark root to these patent everyday branches. He turned again to the picture of Timmie Willie at the X-gate, the camera on her wrist: the moment of divergence, the place or was it time where the parting came.

Can You Find the Faces

He had always thought of himself as rational, commonsensical, an employer of evidences and a balancer of claims; a changeling, it seemed, in a family of mad believers and sybils and gnomic fancifiers. At the teacher’s college where he had learned about the scientific method and logic, he had also been given a new Bible, that is Darwin’s Descent of Man; in fact it was between its pages of careful Victorian science that he flattened Nora and Timmie Willie’s camera-work when the finished prints had dried into scrolls.

When Nora at evening with a new pink flush on her brown cheekbones had brought him the camera, breathless with some excitement, he had indulgently taken it to his red-lit cell in the basement, extracted the film, washed it in amnionic fluid, dried it and printed it. “You mustn’t look at them, though,” Nora said to him, “because, well,” dancing from foot to foot, “in some of them we were—Stark Naked!” And he had promised, thinking of the Muslim letter-readers who must cover their ears when they read letters for their clients, so as not to overhear the contents.

They were naked by the lake in one or two, which interested and disturbed him profoundly (your own sisters!). Otherwise for a long time he didn’t look carefully at them again. Nora and Timmie Willie lost interest; Nora had found a new toy in Violet’s old cards, and Timmie met Alex Mouse that summer. And so they lay between the pages of Darwin, facing the closely-reasoned arguments and the engravings of skulls. It was only after he had developed an impossible, an inexplicable picture of his parents on a thundery day that he searched them out again: looked closely at them: examined them with loupe and reading-glass: studied them more intently than he ever had the “Can You Find the Faces” pictures in St. Nicholas magazine.

And he found the faces.

He was rarely thereafter to see a picture anything like as clear and unambiguous as that picture of John and Violet and that other at the stone table. It was as though that one were a goad, a promise, to keep him searching through images far more subtle and puzzling. He was an investigator, without prejudice, and wouldn’t say that he was “allowed” that one glimpse, that it was “intended” to make his life a search for further evidences, for some unambiguous answer to all the impossible puzzlement. Yet it had that effect. As it happened, he had nothing else pressing for his life to be about.

For there had to be, he was a certain of it, an explanation. An explanation, not airy talk like Grandy’s of worlds-within-worlds or cryptic utterances out of Violet’s subconscious.

He thought at first (even hoped, glass in hand) that he was wrong: tricked, deluded. Discounting the one singular image at the stone table—scientifically speaking an anomaly and therefore without interest—might not all these others be, oh, an ivy vine twisted into the shape of a claw-hand, light falling on a celandine so as to make a face? He knew light had its gifts and its surprises; could not these be among them? No, they could not. Nora and Timmie Willie had caught, by accident or design, creatures that seemed on the point of metamorphosis from natural to outlandish. A bird’s face here and yet that claw which gripped the branch was a hand, a hand in a sleeve. There wasn’t any doubt about it when you studied it long enough. This cobweb was no cobweb but the trailing skirt of a lady whose pale face was collared in these dark leaves. Why hadn’t he given them a camera of higher resolution? There appeared to be crowds of them in some pictures, receding into the unfocused background. What size were they? All sizes, or else the perspective was Somehow distorted. As long as his little finger? As big as a toad? He printed them on lantern slides and threw them on a sheet, and sat before them for hours.

“Nora, did you when you went to the woods that day”— careful, mustn’t prejudice her answer—“see anything, well, special to take pictures of?”

“No. Nothing special. Just… well, not special.”

“Maybe we could go out again, with a good camera, see what we could see.”

“Oh, Auberon.”

He consulted Darwin, and the glimmer of a hypothesis began to be seen as though far off but coming closer.

In the primeval forests, by some unimaginable eon-long struggle, the race of Man separated itself from its near cousins the hairy apes. It appeared that there had been more than one attempt so to differentiate a Man, and that all of them had failed, leaving no trace behind except for the odd anomolous bone. Dead ends. Man alone had learned speech—fire—tool-making, and so was the only sapient one to survive.

Or was he?

Suppose a branch of our old family tree—a branch that seemed doomed to wither—had in fact not died out but survived, survived by learning arts just as new to the world but utterly different from the tool-making and fire-building of its grosser cousins, us. Suppose that instead they had learned concealment, smallification, disappearance, and some way to blind the eyes of beholders.

Suppose they had learned to leave no trace; no barrow, flint, glyph; no bone, no tooth.

Except that now Man’s arts had caught up with them, had discovered an eye dull enough to see them and record the fact, a retina of celluloid and silver-salts less forgetful, less confusable; an eye that couldn’t deny what it had seen.

He thought of the thousands of years—hundreds of thousands—it had taken men to learn what they knew, the arts they had invented out of absolute dark animal ignorance; how they had come to cast pots, amazing thing, whose clumsy shards we find now amid fires cold a millennium and the gnawed bones of prey and neighbors. This other race, supposing it existed, supposing data proving its existence could he found, must have spent those same millennia perfecting its own arts. There was the story Grandy told, that in Britain the Little People were those original inhabitants driven to littleness and secret wiles by invaders who carried iron weapons— thus their ancient fear and avoidance of iron. Maybe so! As (he turned Darwin’s dense and cautious pages) turtles grow shells, zebras paint themselves in stripes; as men, like babies, grasped and gabbled, these others retreated into learned crafts of undiscoverability and track-covering until the race that planted, made, built, hunted with weapons no longer noticed their presence in our very midst—except for the discountable tales of goodwives who left dishes of milk on the sill for them, or the drunkard or the madman from whom they could not or chose not to hide.

They could not or chose not to hide from Timmie Willie and Nora Drinkwater, who had taken their likeness with a Kodak.

These Few Windows

From that time on his photography became for him not an entertainment but a tool, a surgical instrument that would slice out the heart of the secret and bring it before his scrutiny. Unfortunately, he discovered that he himself was barred from witnessing any further evidences of their presence. His photographs of woods, no matter of what spooky and promising corners, were only woods. He needed mediums, which endlessly complicated his task. He continued to believe—how could he not?—that the lens and the salted film behind it were impassive, that a camera could no more invent or falsify images than a frosted glass could make up fingerprints. And yet if someone were present with him when he made what seemed to him random images—a child, a sensitive—then sometimes the images grew faces and revealed personages, subtly perhaps, but study revealed them.

Yet what child?

Evidences. Data. There were the eyebrows, for one thing. He was convinced that the single eyebrow which some, but not all of them, had, inherited from Violet had something to do with it. August had had it, thick and dark over his nose, where it would sometimes grow a spray of long hairs like those over a cat’s nose. Nora had had a trace of it, and Timmie Willie had had it, though when she became a young woman she shaved and plucked it constantly. Most of the Mouse children, who looked most like Grandy, hadn’t had it, nor John Storm nor Grandy himself.

And Auberon lacked it too.

Violet always said that in her part of England a single eyebrow marked you as a violent, criminal person, possibly a maniac. She laughed at it, and at Auberon’s idea of it, and in all the encyclopaedic explanations and conflations of the last Architecture there was nothing about eyebrows.

All right then. Maybe all that about eyebrows was just a way for him to discover why it was that he had been excluded, couldn’t see them though his camera could, as Violet could, as Nora had for a time been able to. Grandy would talk for hours about the little worlds, and who might be admitted there, but had no reasons, no reasons; he’d pore over Auberon’s pictures and talk about magnification, enlargement, special lenses. He didn’t know quite what he was talking about, but Auberon did make some experiments that way, looking for a door. Then Grandy and John insisted on publishing some of the pictures he had collected in a little book—“a religious book, for children,” John said, and Grandy wrote his own commentary, including his views on photography, and made such a hash of it that no one paid the slightest attention to it, not even— especially—children. Auberon never forgave them. It was hard enough to think of it all impartially, scientifically, not to suppose you were mad or deeply fooled, without the whole world saying you were. Or at least the few who cared to comment.

He came to the conclusion that they had reduced his struggle in this way—a children’s book!—just in order to further exclude him. He had allowed them to do it because of his own deep sense of exclusion. He was outside, in every way; not John’s son, not truly the younger children’s brother, not of Violet’s placid mind but not brave and lost like August; without the eyebrow, without belief. He was as well a lifelong bachelor, without wife or progeny; he was in fact almost a virgin. Almost. Excluded even from that company, yet he had never possessed anyone he had ever loved.

He felt now little anguish over all that. He had lived his whole life longing for unattainables, and such a life eventually achieves a balance, mad or sane. He couldn’t complain. They were all exiles here anyway, he shared that at least with them, and he envied no one’s happiness. He certainly didn’t envy Timmie Willie, who had fled from here to the City; he didn’t dare envy lost August. And he had always had these few windows, gray and black, still and changeless, casements opening on the perilous lands.

He closed the portfolio (it released a perfumy smell of old, broken black leather) and with it the new attempt at classification of these and the long sequence of his other pictures, ordinary and otherwise, up to the present day. He would leave it all as it was, in discrete chapters, neatly but oh inadequately crossreferenced. The decision didn’t dismay him. He had often in his late life attempted this reclassification, and each time come to this same conclusion.

He patiently did up the knots of 1911-1915 and got up to take from its secret place a large display-hook with a buckram cover. Unlabeled. It needed none. It contained many late images, beginning only ten, twelve years ago; yet it was companion to the old portfolio which contained his first. It represented another kind of photography he did, the left hand of his life-work, though the right hand of Science had for a long time not known what this left hand was doing. In the end it was the left hand’s work which mattered; the right had shriveled. He became, perhaps had always been, lefthanded.

It was easier to discover when he had become a scientist than to discover when he had ceased to be one; the moment, if there was one, when his flawed nature had betrayed him and, without divulging it, abandoned the great search in favor of—well, what? Art? Were the precious images in this buckrarn book art, and if they weren’t did he care?

Love. Did he dare call it love?

He placed the book on the black portfolio, from which it grew, as a rose from a black thorn. He saw that he had his whole life piled up before him, beneath the hissing lamp. A pale night moth destroyed itself against the lamp’s white mantle.

Daily Alice said to Smoky in the mossy cave in the woods: “He’d say, Let’s go out in the woods and see what we can see. And he’d pack up his camera, sometimes he’d take a little one, and some- times the big one, the wood and brass one with legs. And we’d pack a lunch. Lots of times we’d come here.

To See What He Could See

“We only came out on days that were hot and sunny so we could take off all our clothes—Sophie and me would—and run around and say Look and Look and sometimes Oh it’s gone when you weren’t really sure you’d seen anything anyway…”

“Take off your clothes? How old were you?”

“I don’t remember. Eight. Till I was maybe twelve.”

“Was that necessary? To do the looking?”

She laughed, a low sound for she was lying down, full length, letting whatever breeze that came by have its way with her—naked now too. “It wasn’t necessary,” she said. “Just fun. Didn’t you like to take your clothes off when you were a kid?”

He remembered the feeling, a kind of mad elation, a freedom, some restraint discarded with the garments: not a feeling quite like grown-up sexual feelings, but as intense. “Never around grownups though.”

“Oh, Auberon didn’t count. He wasn’t… well, one of them, I guess. In fact I suppose we were doing it all for him. He got just as crazy.”

“I bet,” Smoky said darkly.

Daily Alice was quiet for a time. Then she said: “He never hurt us. Never, never made us do anything. We suggested things! He wouldn’t. We were all sworn to secrecy—and we swore him to secrecy. He was—like a spirit, like Pan or something. His excitement made us excited. We’d run around and shriek and roll on the ground. Or just stand stock still with a big buzz just filling you up till you thought you’d burst with it. It was magic.”

“And you never told.”

“No! Not that it mattered. Everybody knew anyway, except oh Mom and Dad and Cloud, anyway they never said anything; but I’ve talked to lots of people, later on, and they say Oh you too? Auberon took you to the woods to see what he could see?” She laughed again. “I guess he’d been at it for years. I don’t know anybody who resented it, though. He picked them well, I guess.”

“Psychological scars.”

“Oh, don’t be stupid.”

He stroked his own nakedness, pearly in the moonlight, drying in the licking breeze. “Did he ever see anything? I mean, besides…”

“No. Never.”

“Did you?”

“We thought we did.” She was of course sure they had: on brave luminous mornings walking expectant and watchful, waiting to be led and feeling (at once, at the same moment) the turning they must take that would lead to a place they had never been but which was intensely familiar, a place that took your hand and said We’re here. And you must look away, and so would see them.

And they would hear Auberon behind them somewhere and be unable to answer him or show him, though it was he who had brought them here, he who had spun them like tops, tops that then walked away from him, walked their own way.

Sophie? he would call. Alice?

But There It Is

The Summer House was all blue within except where the lamp glowed, with less authority now. Auberon, dusting his fingers rapidly against his thumbs, went around the little place peering into boxes and corners. He found what he wanted then, a large envelope of marbled paper, last one of many he had had once, in which French platinum printing-papers had long ago been mailed to him.

A fierce pain no worse than longing stitched up his torso, but went away again, more quickly than longing used to when he felt longing. He took the album of buckram and slipped it into the marbled envelope. He undid his ancient Waterman’s (he’d never allowed his students to write with ball points or any of that) and wrote in his schoolmarm hand—shuddery now as though seen under water—For Daily Alice and Sophie. A great pressure seemed to enlarge his heart. He added: And for no one else. He thought of adding an exclamation, but didn’t; only sealed it tightly. The black portfolio he put no name on. It was—all the rest of it was—for no living person anyway.

He went out into his yard. Still the birds for some reason had not begun. He tried to urinate at the lawn’s edge but could not, gave up, went to sit on the canvas chair damp with dew.

He had always imagined, without of course ever believing it, that he would know this moment. He imagined that it would come at their time, unphotographable twilight; and that years after he had surrendered it all, grown hopeless, bitter even, in that twilight one would come to him, stepping through the gloaming without sound and without causing the sleeping flowers to nod. A child, it would seem to be, discarnate flesh glowing as in an antique platinum print, whose silver hair would be as though on fire, lit by the sun which had just set or perhaps hadn’t yet risen. He wouldn’t speak to it, unable to, stone dead already it may be; but it would speak to him. It would say: “Yes, you knew us. Yes, you alone came close to the whole secret. Without you, none of the others could have come near us. Without your blindness, they couldn’t have seen us; without your loneliness, they couldn’t have loved each other, or engendered their young. Without your disbelief, they couldn’t have believed. I know it’s hard for you to think the world could work in this strange way, but there it is.”

In the Woods

By noon next day, clouds had gathered, fitting themselves together resolutely and without haste, seeming when they had put out all the sky to be almost low enough to touch.

The road they walked between Meadowbrook and Highland wound up and down amid an aged forest. The well-grown trees stood close together, their roots it must be all interlaced below; above the road, their branches met and grappled together, so it seemed the oaks grew maple leaves and the hickories oak leaves. They suffered great choking garments of ivy, especially the riddled and fibrous trunks of the dead, propped against their old neighbors, unable to fall.

“Dense,” Smoky said.

“Protected,” Daily Alice said.

“How do you mean?”

She held out a hand, to see whether the rain had begun, and her palm was struck once, then again. “Well, it’s never been logged. Not anyway in a hundred years.”

The rain came on steadily, without haste, as the clouds had; this wasn’t to be some fickle shower, but a well-prepared day’s rain. “Damn,” she said. She pulled a crumpled yellow hat from her pack and put it on, but it was apparent they were in for a wetting.

“How far is it?”

“To the Woods’ house? Not too far. Wait a minute though.” She stopped, and looked back the way they had come, then the way they were going. Smoky’s bare head began to itch from the drops. “There’s a shortcut,” Alice said. “A path you can take, instead of going all the way around by the road. It ought to be right around here, if I can find it.”

They walked back and forth along the apparently impassable margin. “Maybe they’ve stopped keeping it up,” she said as they searched. “They’re kind of strange. Solitary. Just live out here all by themselves and almost never see anybody.” She stopped before an ambiguous hole in the undergrowth and said: “Here it is,” without confidence, Smoky thought. They started in. The rain ticked in the leaves steadily, the sound growing less discontinuous and more a single voice, surprisingly loud, drowning out the sounds their own progress made. It was dark as night beneath the trees beneath the clouds, and not lightened by the silver shimmer of the rain.

“Alice?”

He stood still. All he could hear was the rain. So intent on making his way along this supposed path that now he’d lost her. And surely he had lost the path too, if there had ever been one. He called out again, a confident, no-nonsense call, no reason to get excited. He got no reply, but just then saw between two trees a true path, quite patent, an easy winding way. She must have found it and just got quickly on ahead while he floundered in the creepers. He took the path and went along, pretty well wet now. Alice should any moment appear before him, but she didn’t. The path led him deeper and deeper beneath the crackling forest; it seemed to unroll before his feet, he couldn’t see where it led, but it was always there to follow. It brought him eventually (long or short time he couldn’t tell, what with the rain and all) to the edge of a wide, grassy glade all ringed with forest giants slick and black with wet.

Down in the glade, seeming insubstantial in the dripping mist, was the oddest house he had ever seen. It was a miniature of one of Drinkwater’s crazy cottages, but all colored, with a bright red tile roof and white walls encumbered with decoration. Not an inch of it hadn’t been curled or carved or colored or blazoned in some way. It looked, odder still, brand new.

Well, this must be it, he thought, but where was Alice? It must have been she, not he, who had got lost. He started down the hill toward the house, through a crowd of red and white mushrooms that had come out in the wetness. The little round door, knockered and peepholed and brass-hinged, was flung open as he came close, and a sharp small face appeared around its edge. The eyes were glittering and suspicious, but the smile was broad.

“Excuse me,” Smoky said, “is this the Woods’?”

“Indeed it is,” the man said. He opened the door wider. “And are you Smoky Barnable?”

“Well I am!” How did he know that?

“Won’t you come right on in.”

If there are more than the two of us in there, Smoky thought, it’ll be crowded. He passed by Mr. Woods, who seemed to be wearing a striped nightcap, and was presenting the interior to Sthoky with the longest, flattest, knobbiest hand Smoky had ever seen. “Nice of you to take me in,” he said, and the little man’s grin grew wider, which Smoky wouldn’t have thought possible. His nutbrown face would split right in two at the ears if it went on growing.

Inside it seemed much larger than it was, or was smaller than it looked, he couldn’t tell which. He felt laughter for some reason rise up in him. There was room in here for a grandfather clock with a cunning expression, a bureau on which pewter candlesticks and mugs stood, a high fluffy bed with a patchwork quilt more varied and comical than any he had ever seen. There was a round, much polished table with a splinted leg, and a domineering wardrobe. There were moreover three more people, all quite comfortably disposed: a pretty woman busy at a squat stove, a baby in a wooden cradle who cooed like a mechanical toy whenever the woman gave the cradle a push, and an old, old lady, all nose and chin and spectacles, who rocked in a corner and knitted quickly on a long striped scarf. All three of these noticed his arrival, but seemed to take no notice.

“Sittee down,” said Mr. Woods. “And tell us your history.”

Somewhere in the blue joyful surprise that filled Smoky to the chin a small voice was trying to say What on earth, but it exploded at that moment like a stepped-on puff-ball and went out. “Well,” he said, “I seem to have lost my way—that is Daily Alice and I had—but now I’ve found you, and I don’t know what’s become of her.”

“Right,” said Mr. Woods. He had put Smoky in a highbacked chair at the table, and now he took from a cupboard a stack of blue-flowered plates which he dealt out around the table like cards. “Take some refreshment,” he said.

As though on cue, the woman drew out from the oven a tin sheet on which a single hot-cross bun steamed. This Mr. Woods put on Smoky’s plate, watching him expectantly. The cross on the bun was not a cross, but a five-pointed star drawn in white icingsugar. He waited a moment for others to be served, but the smell of the bun was so rich and curranty that he picked it up and ate it without pause. It was as good as it smelled.

“I’m just married,” he said then, and Mr. Woods nodded. “You know Daily Alice Drinkwater.”

“We do.”

“We think we’ll be happy together.”

“Yes and no.”

“What?”

“Well what would you say, Mrs. Underhill? Happy together?”

“Yes and no,” said Mrs. Underhill.

“But how…” Smoky began. An immense sadness flew over him.

“All part of the Tale,” Mrs. Underhill said. “Don’t ask me how.”

“Be specific,” Smoky said challengingly.

“Oh, well,” said Mr. Woods. “It’s not like that, you know.” His face had grown long and contemplative, and he rested his chin in the great cup of one hand while the long fingers of the other strummed the table. “What gift did she give you, though? Tell us that.”

That was very unfair. She had given him everything. Herself. Why should she have to give him any other gift? And yet even as he said it, he remembered that she had on their wedding night offered him a true gift. “She gave me,” he said proudly, “her childhood. Because I didn’t have one of my own. She said I could use it any time I liked.”

Mr. Woods cocked an eye at him. “But,” he said slyly, “did she give you a bag to put it in?” His wife (if that’s who she was) nodded at this stroke. Mrs. Underhill rocked smugly. Even the baby seemed to coo as though it had scored a point.

“It’s not a matter of that,” Smoky said. Since he had eaten the hot-star bun, emotions seemed to sweep him alternately like swift changes of season. Autumnal tears rose to his eyes. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I couldn’t take the gift. You see”—this was difficult to explain—“when she was young she believed in fairies. The whole family did. I never did. I think they still do. Now that’s crazy. How could I believe in that? I wanted to—that is, I wanted to have believed in them, and seen therh, but if I never did—if the thought never occurred to me—how can I take her gift?”

Mr. Woods was shaking his head rapidly. “No, no,” he said. “It’s a perfectly fine gift.” He shrugged. “But you have no bag to put it in is all. See here! We’ll give you gifts. Real ones. No holding back on essential parts.” He flung open a humpbacked chest bound with black iron. It seemed to glow within. “See!” he said, drawing out a long snake of a necklace. “Gold!” The others there looked at Smoky, smiling in approval of this gift, and waiting for Smoky’s amazed gratitude.

“It’s… very kind,” Smoky said. Mr. Woods draped the glowing coils around Smoky’s neck, once, again, as though he meant to strangle him. The gold was not cold as metal should be but warm as flesh. It seemed to weight his neck, so heavy it was, to bend his back.

“What more?” Mr. Woods said, looking around him, finger to his lips. Mrs. Underhill with one of her needles pointed to a round leather box on top of the cupboard. “Right!” Mr. Woods said. “How about this?” He fingered the box from its high place till it fell into his arms. He popped open the lid. “A hat!”

It was a red hat, high-crowned and soft, belted with a plaited belt in which a white owl’s feather nodded. Mr. Woods and Mrs. Underhill said Aaaaah, and watched closely as Mr. Woods fitted it to Smoky’s head. It was as heavy as a crown. “I wonder,” Smoky said, “what became of Daily Alice.”

“Which reminds me,” Mr. Woods said with a smile, “last but not least but best…” From under the bed he drew out a faded and mouse-chewed Gladstone carpetbag. He brought it to the table and placed it tenderly before Smoky. A sadness seemed to have entered him too. His great hands stroked the bag as though it were beloved. “Smoky Barnable,” he said. “This is in my gift. She couldn’t give it, no matter that she wanted to. It’s old but all the more capacious for that. I bet there’s room in it for…” A doubt came over him, and he snapped open the crossbones catch of the bag and looked inside. He grinned. “Ah, plenty of room. Not only for her gift, but pockets too for your unbelief, and whatever else. It’ll come in handy.”

The empty bag was heaviest of all.

“That’s all,” said Mrs. Underhill, and the grandfather clock struck sweetly.

“Time you were going,” said Mrs. Woods, and the baby choked impatiently.

“What’s become of Alice?” Mr. Woods said thoughtfully. He turned twice around the room, looking out the small deep windows and peering into corners. He opened a door; beyond it Smoky glimpsed utter darkness and heard a long, sleepy whisper before Mr. Woods closed it quickly. He lifted his finger and his eyebrows went up with a sudden idea. He went to the tall wardrobe that stood on claw feet in the corner; he threw open its doors, and Smoky saw the wet woods he had come through with Alice—and, far off, loitering in the afternoon, Alice herself. He was shown into the wardrobe.

“It was very nice of you,” he said, stooping to enter. “Giving me all this stuff.”

“Forget it,” said Mr. Woods, his voice sounding distant and vague. The wardrobe doors shut on him with a long noise like a far great low-voiced bell. He walked through the wet underbrush, slapped at by branches, his nose starting to run.

“What on earth,” Daily Alice said when she saw him.

“I’ve been in the Woods’,” he said.

“I guess you have. Look at you.”

A thick tangle of creeper had Somehow got twined around his neck; its tenacious prickles tore his flesh and plucked at his shirt. “Damn,” he said. She laughed, and began to pull leaves from his hair.

“Did you fall? How did you get dead leaves all in your hair? What’s that you’ve got?”

“A bag,” he said. “It’s all right now.” He raised to show her the long-dead hornet’s nest he carried; its fine paper-work was broken in places and showed the tunneled interior. A ladybug crawled from it like a spot of blood and flew away.

“Fly away home,” Daily Alice said. “It’s all right now. The path was there all the time. Come on.”

The great weight he felt was his pack, sodden with rain. He wanted desperately to put it down. He followed her along a rutted trail, and soon they came to a great littered clearing below a crumbling bank of clay. In the midst of the clearing was a brown shack with a tarpaper roof, tied to the woods by a dripping clothesline. A pickup truck sat wheelless on concrete blocks in the yard, and a black-andwhite cat prowled, looking damp and furious. A woman in apron and galoshes was waving to them from the wire-bound chicken house.

“The Woods,” Daily Alice said.

“Yes.”

And yet, even when they had coffee in front of them, and Amy and Chris Woods were talking of this and that, and his discarded pack lay puddling the linoleum, still Smoky felt press on him a weight given him, which he could not shake off, and which gradually came to seem as if it had always been there. He thought he could carry it.

Of the rest of that day, and the rest of their adventures on that journey, Smoky later on would remember very little. Daily Alice would remind him later of this or that, in the middle of a silence, as though she rehearsed that journey often when her mind had nothing else to do, and he’d say, “Oh yes,” and perhaps really remember what she spoke of and perhaps not.

On that same day Cloud on the porch by the glass table, thinking only to complete her pursuit of those same adventures, turned up a trump called the Secret, and when she prepared to put it in its place gasped, began to tremble; her eyes filled with sudden tears, and when Mother came to call her for lunch, Cloud, red-eyed and still surprised that she had not known or suspected, told her without hesitation or doubt what she had learned. And so when Smoky and Daily Alice returned, brown, scratched and happy, they found the blinds drawn in the front windows (Smoky didn’t know this old custom) and Doctor Drinkwater solemn on the porch. “Auberon is dead,” he said.

By the Way

Rooks (Smoky supposed) fled home across a cloudstreaked chilly sky toward naked trees which gestured beyond the newly-turned furrows of a March field (he was quite sure it was March). A split-rail fence, nicely cracked and knotholed, separated the field from the road, where a Traveler walked, looking a bit like Dante in Doré, with a peaked hood. At his feet were a row of white, red-capped mushrooms, and the Traveler’s face had a look of alarm—well, surprise—because the last small mushroom in the row had tilted up its red hat and was looking at him with a sly smile from beneath the brim.

“It’s an original,” Doctor Drinkwater said, indicating the picture with his sherry glass. “Given to my grandmother Violet by the artist. He was an admirer of hers.”

Because his childhood books had been Caesar and Ovid, Smoky had never seen the man’s work before, his pollarded, faced trees and evening exactness; he was struck by it in ways he couldn’t analyze. It was called By the Way, like a whisper in his ear. He sipped his sherry. The doorbell (it was the kind where you turn a key to make the noise, but what a noise) rang, and he saw Mother hurry by the parlor door, wiping her hands on her apron.

He had made himself useful, less affected as he was than the rest of them. He and Rudy Flood dug the grave, in a place on the grounds where these Drinkwaters lay together. There was John. Violet. Harvey Cloud. It was a fiercely hot day; above the maples burdened with awesome weight of leaves there hung a vapour, as though the trees panted it out with their soft breathing in the fainting breeze. Rudy expertly shaped the place, his shirt plastered with sweat to his great stomach; worms fled from their spades, or from the light, and the cool, dark earth they turned out turned pale quickly.

And the next day people arrived, all the guests from his wedding or most of them, appearing in their sudden way, some wearing the same clothes they had worn for the wedding since they hadn’t expected another Drinkwater occasion so soon; and Auberon was buried without minister or prayer, only the long requiem of the harmonium, which sounded now calm and Somehow full of gladness.

“Why is it,” Mother said returning from the door with a sky-blue Pyrex dish covered with foil, “that everyone thinks you’re starving after a funeral? Well, it’s very kind.”

Good Advice

Great-aunt Cloud tucked her damp hankie away in a black sleeve. “I think of the children,” she said. “All there today, year after year of them—Frank Bush and Claude Berry were in his very first class after the Deci- sion.”

Doctor Drinkwater bit on a briar pipe he really seldom used, took it out and stared hard at it, as though surprised to find it was inedible.

“Decision?” Smoky said.

“Berry et al. vs. Board of Ed,” Doc said solemnly.

“I guess we can eat this now,” Mother came in to say. “Sort of pot luck. Bring your glasses. Bring the bottle, Smoky—I’m having another.” And at the dining table Sophie sat in tears because she had set without thinking a place for Auberon, who always came to eat on this day, Saturday. “How could I just forget,” she said through the napkin covering her face. “He loved us so much…” Still with the napkin over her face, she went quickly out. Smoky seemed hardly to have seen her face since he arrived, only her retreating back.

“She and you were his favorites,” Cloud said, touching Daily Alice’s hand.

“I suppose I’ll go up and see Sophie,” Mother said, irresolute by the door.

“Sit down, Mother,” Doc said softly. “It’s not one of those times.” He helped Smoky to one of the three bowls of potato salad there were among the funeral offerings. “Well. Berry et al. It was thirty some years ago…”

“You lose track of time,” Mother said. “It’s more like forty-five.”

“Anyway. We’re very out-of-the-way up here. Rather than trouble the State about our kids and all, we’d set up a little private school. Nothing fancy at all. But it began to appear that our school had to meet Standards. State Standards. Now the kids could read and write as well as any, and learned their math; but the Standards said they had to learn as well History, and Civics whatever that is or was, and a lot of other stuff we just didn’t think was necessary. If you know how to read, the World of Books is open to you, after all; and if you like to read, you’ll read. If you don’t, you’ll forget whatever anybody makes you read, anyway. People around here aren’t ignoramuses; just have an idea—or rather a lot of different ideas— about what’s important to know, and very little of it’s taught in school.

“Well, it turns out that our little school was closed down, and all the kids went outside to school for a couple of years…”

“They said our Standards didn’t fit our students for the real world,” Mother said.

“What’s so real about it?” Cloud said testily. “What I’ve seen lately doesn’t seem so real to me.”

“This was forty years ago, Nora.”

“Hasn’t gotten any realer since then.”

“I went to the public school for a while,” Mother said. “It didn’t seem so bad. Only you always had to be there at exactly the same time every day, spring or winter, rain or shine; and they didn’t let you out till exactly the same hour every day, as well.” She marveled, looking back on it.

“How was the Civics and all that,” Daily Alice asked, squeezing Smoky’s hand under the table because the answer was a venerable clincher.

“You know what?” Mother said to Smoky. “I don’t remember a single thing about them. Not a single thing.”

And that was just how the School System had appeared to Smoky. Most of the kids he had known forgot everything they learned in school as soon as they left those (to him) mysterious halls. “Boy,” he’d say, “you ought to go to school with my father. He never lets you forget a thing.” On the other hand, when they questioned him about schoolroom fixtures like the Pledge of Allegiance or Arbor Day or Prince Henry the Navigator, he was made of ignorance. They thought he was strange, when they noticed him at all.

“So Claude Berry’s dad got in trouble for keeping him out of the public school, and it became a case,” Cloud was saying. “All the way to the State Supreme Court.”

“Bent our bank accounts out of shape,” Doc said.

“And eventually was decided in our favor,” Mom said.

“Because,” Cloud said, “It was a religious thing, we claimed. Like the Amish, do you know about them?” She smiled slyly. “Religious.”

“A landmark decision,” Mom said.

“Nobody’s heard of it, though,” Doc said, wiping his lips. “I think, the court surprised itself by the way it decided, and it was kept quiet; don’t want to start people thinking, get their wind up, so to speak. But we’ve had no trouble since then.”

“We had good advice,” Cloud said, lowering her eyes; and they all consented silently to that.

Smoky, taking another glass of sherry and arguing from ignorance, began talking about a loophole in the Standards he knew of—that is, himself—and the superior education he’d anyway received, and how he wouldn’t have it any other way, when Doctor Drinkwater suddenly struck the table with his palm, gavel-style, and beamed on Smoky, the light of a bright idea in his eyes.

What About It

“What about that?” Daily Alice said to him much later when they lay in bed.

“What?”

“What Dad suggested.”

They had just the sheet over them in the heat, which only since midnight had begun to break apart into breezes. The long white hills and dales made by her body shifted cataclysmically and settled into a different country. “I don’t know,” he said,, feeling muzzy and thoughtless, helpless against sleep. He tried to think of some more pointed answer, but instead fell off into sleep. She shifted nervously again and he was snatched back.

“What.”

“I think of Auberon,” she said quietly, wiping her face on her pillow. He took her up then, and she hid her face in the hollow of his shoulder and sniffed. He stroked her hair, running his fingers soothingly through it, which she loved as much as a cat does, until she slept. And when she was asleep, he found himself staring into the sparkling phantasmal ceiling, surprised by sleeplessness, not having heard of the rule whereby one spouse can trade a restlessness for the other’s sleep—a rule spelled out in no marriage contract.

Well, what about it then?

He had been taken in here, adopted, it seemed not an issue that he would ever leave. Since nothing had before been said about their future together, he hadn’t thought about it himself: he was unaccustomed to having a future is what it was, since his present had always been so ill-defined.

But now, anonymous no more, he must make a decision. He put his hands behind his head, carefully so as not to disturb her still-fresh sleep. What sort of a person was he, if he was now a sort of person? Anonymous, he had been as well everything as nothing; now he would grow qualities, a character, likes and dislikes. And did he like or dislike the idea of living in this house, teaching at their school, being—well, religious he supposed was how they would put it? Did it suit his character?

He looked at the dim range of snowy mountains which Daily Alice made beside him. If he was a character, she had made him one. And if he was a character, he was probably a minor one: a minor character in someone else’s story, this tall story he had got himself into. He would have his entrances and exits, contribute a line of dialogue now and then. Whether the character would be crabby schoolmaster or something else didn’t seem to matter much, and would be decided along the way. Well then.

He examined himself carefully for feelings of resentment at this. He did feel a certain nostalgia for his vanished anonymity, for the infinity of possibilities it contained; but he also felt her breathing next to him, and the house’s breathing around him, and in rhythm with them he fell asleep, nothing decided.

While the moon smoothly shifted the shadows from one side of Edgewood to the other, Daily Alice dreamed that she stood in a flower-starred field where on a hill there grew an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace, their branches intertwined like fingers. Far down the hall, Sophie dreamed that there was a tiny door in her elbow, open a crack, through which the wind blew, blowing on her heart. Doctor Drinkwater dreamed he sat before his typewriter and wrote this: “There is an aged, aged insect who lives in a hole in the ground. One June he puts on his summer straw, and takes his pipe and his staff and his lamp in half his hands, and follows the worm and the root to the stair that leads up to the door into blue summer.” This seemed immensely significant to him, but when he awoke he wouldn’t be able to remember a word of it, try as he might. Mother beside him dreamed her husband wasn’t in his study at all, but with her in the kitchen, where she drew tin cookie-sheets endlessly out of the oven; the baked things on them were brown and round, and when he asked her what they were, she said “Years.”