Little, Big

After John Drinkwater’s death in 1920, Violet, unable to bear or even believe in the thirty years and more of life without him promised her by her cards, retreated for a long time to an upstairs room. Her thick dark hair, turned prematurely white, and her elfin thinness, grown more pronounced because of a sudden distaste she took in that year to most food, gave her the appearance of great and fragile age, though she didn’t seem aged; her skin remained unlined for many more years, and her dark, liquid eyes never lost the infant, feral innocence which John Drinkwater had first seen in them in the last century.

Retreats and Operations

It was a nice room, facing in several directions at once, In one corner, half the interior of a dome (all the interior it had, though its exterior was whole) made a windowed retreat, and she had a big buttoned chaise there. Elsewhere, her bed, hung with the gauzy curtains and covered with the eiderdowns and ivory-colored laces with which the mother she had never known had clothed her own sad marriage bed; a broad oxblood-colored mahogany table, piled up with John Drinkwater’s papers, which she had at first thought to put in some order, and maybe publish, he had loved to publish, but which in the end she only left piled there under the gooseneck brass lamp; the humpbacked cracked leather trunk from which they had come and into which, years later, they would go again; a couple of splayed velvet armchairs, napless and cozy, by the fire; and those small things—her silver and tortoiseshell combs and brushes, a painted music-box, her strange cards—which her children and grandchildren and visitors would later remember as being the chief furnishings of the room.

Her children, except August, didn’t resent this abdication of Violet’s. She had not often been wholly present anyway, and this seemed only the natural continuation of her daily abstraction. They all, except August, loved her deeply and uncritically, and would contest with each other over who would bring up her frugal and as often as not uneaten meals, make up her fire, read her her mail, or be the first to bring her news.

“August found a new use for his Ford,” Auberon told her as they looked together through some pictures he had taken. “He took a wheel off, and hitched it with a belt to Ezra Meadows’ saw. Then the engine will turn the saw, and cut wood.”

“I hope they don’t go far,” Violet said.

“What? Oh, no,” he said, laughing at the image she must have, of a tooth-wheeled Model T tearing through the woods, felling trees as it went. “No. The car is put up on logs, so the wheels just go around but don’t go anywhere. It’s just to saw with, not to drive around.”

“Oh.” Her slim hands touched the teapot, to see if it were still warm. “He’s very clever,” she said, as though she meant something else.

It was a clever idea, though not August’s; he had read of it in an illustrated mechanics magazine, and persuaded Ezra Meadows to try it out. It proved to be a little more laborious than the magazine described it, what with leaping in and out of the driver’s seat to alter the blade’s speed, cranking each time the engine stalled out on a knot in the wood, and shouting What? What? back and forth with Ezra over the racket it made; and August had little interest in the production of sawn wood anyway. But he loved his Ford, and anything it could be made to do, from bouncing obliviously down railroad tracks to skimming and whirling like a four-wheeled Nijinsky over a frozen lake, he made it do. Ezra, suspicious at first, at least didn’t have the airy contempt for Henry Ford’s masterpiece which his family or people like the Flowers had; and making such a to-do in Ezra’s yard brought out from her chores more than once his daughter Amy. Once with a dishclout in her hand, abstractedly wiping a white-speckled black tin frying pan as she stared; again with her hands and apron floured. The belt of the saw broke, and went flapping wildly. August cut the engine.

“There now, Ezra, look at that. Look at that stack.” The fresh yellow wood, rough-cut and burned in brown arcs here and there by the blade’s insistence, gave out its sweet odor, resin and pastry. “That would have taken you a week by hand. What do you think of that?”

“It’s all right.”

“What do you think, Amy? Pretty nice?” She smiled, and looked shy, as though it were she he was praising.

“It’s all all right,” said Ezra. “Gwan, git.” This to Amy, whose expression changed to a hurt hauteur as sweet to August as her smile; she tossed her head and went, slowly, so as not to appear dismissed.

Ezra helped him bolt back the wheel of the Ford in silence; an ungrateful silence, August thought, though maybe the farmer was afraid that if he opened his mouth the subject of payment might come up. He was in no danger; for August, unlike the youngest son in all the old tales, knew he couldn’t demand, in return for the accomplishment of an impossible task (the sawing of a couple hundred board feet in a single afternoon), the hand of his beautiful daughter.

Rolling home along the familiar roads, raising the familiar dust, August felt sharply the congruence (which everyone else saw as a contradiction) of his car and this deep summer. He made a small, unnecessary adjustment to the throttle, and tossed his straw hat on the seat next to him; he thought that if the evening were fine he might drive to some spots he knew of, and do some fishing. He was conscious of a bliss that stole over him not infrequently now, had first stolen over him when he had first acquired his car, first bent up its bat-wing hood and seen the engine and drive-train, humble and useful like his own internal organs. It was a sense that at last what he knew of the world was sufficient to his being alive in it: that the world and what he knew of it were one. He called this feeling “growing up,” and it did feel like growing, though in moments of mad elation he would wonder if what he was growing into weren’t a Ford, or perhaps Ford: there was no other instrument, and no other man, so serenely purposeful and complete, August thought, so sufficient to the world and so self-sufficient: it would have been a destiny he could welcome.

Everyone else seemed bent on thwarting it. When he told Pop (he called his father Pop to himself and to Amy, though he had never said it to John’s face) that what was needed in this area was a garage, which could dispense gas and make repairs, and sell Fords, and had laid out the literature he’d got from the Ford company about what it would cost to set up such an agency (he hadn’t proposed himself as agent, he knew he was too young at sixteen for that, but he would be happy just pumping the gas and making repairs, very happy), his father had smiled and not considered it even for five minutes, had sat nodding while August explained it to him only because he loved his son, and loved to indulge him. And then he said: “Would you like a car of your own?”

Well, yes; but August knew he had been treated like a boy, though he had made his proposal as carefully as any man; and his father, whose concerns were so weirdly childish, had smiled at it as though it were a child’s mad desire, and bought him the car only to allay it.

But it was not allayed. Pop didn’t understand. Before the war, things were different. Nobody knew anything. You could go walking in the woods and make up stories and see things if you wanted. But there was no excuse now. Now knowledge was there to be had, real knowledge, knowledge of how the world operates and what must be done to operate it. Operate. “The operator of a Ford Model T will find setting the spark simple and convenient. The operation is performed in this way…” And August drew these knowledges on, reasonable and close-fitting, over the mad muddle of his childhood, as one draws on a duster over a suit of clothes, and buttoned them up to the neck.

A Swell Idea

“What you need,” he told his mother that afternoon, “is some fresh air. Let me take you out for a drive. Come on.” He came to take her hands, to lift her from the chaise, and though she gave him her hands they both knew, for they had enacted all this several times the same way, that she wouldn’t rise and certainly wouldn’t ride. But she kept his hands in hers. “You can bundle up, and anyway with the roads around here you can’t go more than fifteen miles an hour…”

“Oh, August.”

“Don’t ‘oh, August’ me,” he said, allowing himself to be drawn down to sit by her, but turning his face away from her lips. “There’s nothing wrong with you, you know, I mean nothing really wrong. You’re just brooding.” That it should be he, the baby, who was compelled to speak sternly to his mother as to a mopey child, when there were older children who ought to be doing it, annoyed him, though it didn’t her.

“Tell me about sawing wood,” she said. “Was little Amy there?”

“She’s not so little.”

“No, no. She’s not. So pretty.”

He supposed he blushed, and he supposed she saw it. He found it embarrassing, almost indecent, that his mother should see that he regarded any girl with other than amused indifference. In fact toward few girls did he feel amused indifference, if the truth were known, and it was known: even his sisters plucked lint from his lapels and brushed back his hair, thick and unruly as his mother’s, with knowing smiles when he mentioned ever so casually that during the course of an evening he might drop in at the Meadows’ or the Flowers’. “Listen, Ma,” he said, faintly peremptory, “now really listen. Before, you know, Papa died, we talked about the garage, and the agency and all that. He didn’t like it so well, but that was four years ago, I was very young. Can we talk about it again? Auberon thinks it’s a swell idea.”

“He does?”

He hadn’t put up any objections; but then he had been behind the darkroom door, in his dim red-lit hermit’s cell, when August had discussed it with him. “Sure. You know, everybody’s going to have an automobile soon. Everybody.”

“Oh, dear.”

“You can’t hide from the future.”

“No, no, that’s true.” She gazed out the windows at the sleeping afternoon. “That’s true.” She had taken a meaning, but not his: he drew out his watch and consulted it, to draw her back.

“So, well,” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said, looking into his face not as though to read it, or to communicate with it, but as though it were a mirror: that frankly, that dreamily. “I don’t know, dear. I think if John didn’t think it was a good idea .

“That was four years ago, Ma.”

“Was it, was it four…” She made an effort, and took his hand again. “You were his favorite, August, did you know that? I mean he loved all of you, but… Well, don’t you think he knew best? He must have thought it all out, he thought everything all out. Oh, no, dear, if he was sure, I don’t think I could do better, really.”

He stood up suddenly and thrust his hands into his pockets. “All right, all right. But don’t blame him, that’s all. You don’t like the idea, you’re afraid of a simple thing like a car, and you never wanted me to have anything at all anyway.”

“Oh, August,” she began to say, but clapped her hand over her mouth.

“All right,” he said. “I guess I’ll tell you, then. I think I’ll go away.” A lump rose to his throat, unexpectedly; he had expected to feel only defiance and triumph. “Maybe to the City. I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?” In a tiny voice, like a child just beginning to understand a huge and terrible thing. “What do you mean?

“Well really,” he said, rounding on her, “I’m a grown man. What do you think? That I’ll just hang around this house for the rest of my life? Well, I won’t.”

The look in her face, of shocked helpless anguish, when all he’d said was what any twenty-year-old might say, when all he felt was the dissatisfaction any ordinary person might feel, made confusion and frustrated common sense boil up in him like a lava. He rushed to her chair and knelt before her. “Ma, Ma,” he said, “what is it? What on earth is it?” He kissed her hand, a kiss like a furious bite.

“I’m afraid, that’s all…”

“No, no, just tell me what’s so terrible. What’s so terrible about wanting to advance yourself, and be, and be normal. What was so wrong”—it was spilling out now, that lava, he neither desired to stop it now nor could if he chose—“about Timmie Willie going to the City? It’s where her husband lives, and she loves him. Is this such a swell house that nobody should ever think of living anyplace else? Even married?”

“There was so much room. And the City’s so far…”

“Well, and what was so wrong when Aub wanted to join the Army? There was a war. Everybody went. Do you want us all to be your babies forever?”

Violet said nothing, though her big pearly tears, like a child’s, trembled at her lashes. She suddenly missed John very much. Into him she could pour all the inarticulate perceptions, all the knowings and unknowings she felt, which, though he couldn’t understand them really, he would receive reverently; and out of him would come then the advice, warnings, notions, the clever decisions she could never have made. She ran her hand through August’s matted, elf-locked hair, no comb could conquer it, and said, “But you know, dear, you know. You remember, don’t you? You do, don’t you?”

He laid his cheek in her lap with a groan, and she continued to stroke his hair. “And autos, August—what would they think? The noise, and the smell. The—the boldness. What must they think? What if you drove them away?”

“No, Ma, don’t.”

“They’re brave, August, you remember the time, when you were a little boy, the time with the wasp, you remember how brave the little one was. You saw. What if—what if it angered them, wouldn’t they plan something, oh something so horrid… They could, you know they could.”

“I was just a little kid.”

“Do you all forget?” she said, not as though to him, but as though questioning herself, questioning a strange perception she had just then had. “Do you all really forget? Is that it? Did Timmie? Do you all?” She raised his face in her hands to study it. “August? Do you forget, or… You mustn’t, you mustn’t forget; if you do…”

“What if they didn’t mind?” August said, defeated. “What if they didn’t care at all? How can you be so sure they’d mind? They’ve got a whole world to themselves, don’t they?”

“I don’t know.”

“Grandy said…”

“Oh, dear, August, I don’t know.”

“Well,” he said, extracting himself from her, “then I’ll go ask. I’ll go ask their permission.” He rose. “If I ask their permission, and they say it’s all right, then…”

“I don’t see how they could.”

“Well, if they do?”

“How could you be sure? Oh, don’t, August, they might lie. No, promise me you won’t. Where are you going?”

“I’m going fishing.”

“August?”

Some Notes About Them

When he was gone the tears rose again to her eyes. She brushed away impatiently the hot drops that rolled down her cheeks, rolled down because she couldn’t explain: nothing she knew could be said, there were not the words, when she tried the very saying of it made what she said into lies or stupidities. They’re brave, she had said to August. They might lie, she had said. None of that was true. They weren’t brave, and they couldn’t lie. Such things were true only when said to children, as it’s true when you say “Grandy’s gone away” to a child, when Grandy is dead, when there is no more Grandy to come or go. And the child says: Where did he go? And you think of an answer a little less true than the first, and so on. And yet you have spoken truly to it, and it has understood, at least as much as you have.

But her children weren’t children any more.

So many years she had tried to form what she knew into language with John, grown-up language, nets to catch the wind, the Meaning of it all, the Intention, the Resolution. Oh great good man! And he had come as close to understanding it as intelligence, unwearying application, orderliness of mind and attention to detail could get.

But there wasn’t any Meaning, or any Intention, or any Resolution. To think that way about them was like trying to do some task while you looked only in a mirror: force them as you might, your hands do the opposite of what they are told to do, away from not toward, left not right, forward not back. She sometimes thought that thinking of them at all was just that: was looking at yourself in a mirror. But what could that mean?

She didn’t want her children to be babies forever, this country seemed full of people furious to grow up and though she hadn’t ever sensed herself growing up she didn’t care to prevent it in others, only she was afraid: if her children forgot what they had known as children, they were in danger. She was sure of that. What danger? And how on earth was she to warn them?

There were no answers, none. All that was within the power of mind and speech was to become more precise in how the questions were put. John had asked her: Do fairies really exist? And there wasn’t any answer to that. So he tried harder, and the question got more circumstantial and tentative, and at the same time more precise and exact; and still there were no answers, only the fuller and fuller form of the question, evolving as Auberon had described to her all life evolving, reaching out limbs and inventing organs, reticulating joints, doing and being in more and more complex yet more and more compact and individuated ways, until the question, perfectly asked, understood its own answerlessness. And then there was an end to that. The last edition, and John died still waiting for his answer.

And yet there were things she knew. On the oxbloodcolored mahogany table stood John’s tall black typewriter, bony and carapaced like an old crustacean. For August’s sake, fcr all of their sakes, she ought to say what she knew. She went to it, sat before it, rested her hands on its keys as a pianist might, thoughtfully, before beginning some soft, sad, almost inaudible nocturne; then realized there was no paper in it. This took a while to find; and her notepaper, when she had rolled a piece within the typewriter’s jaws, looked small and shrinking and unready to receive the blows of the keys. But she began, using two fingers, and spelled out this:

and beneath this, the word Grandy had used to write on the desultory journals he kept:

Now what? She advanced the paper, and wrote:

She thought about this for a moment, and then directly under it, she added:

She meant that they didn’t care, that their concerns weren’t ours, that if they brought gifts—and they had; if they arranged a marriage or an accident—and they had; if they watched and waited—and they did, none of that was with any reason to aid or hurt mortals. Their reasons were their own—if they had reasons at all, she sometimes thought they didn’t, any more than stones or seasons have.

She considered this, cheek in hand, and said “No,” and carefully x’d out “made” and wrote “born” above it, then x’d out “born” and wrote “made” above it, and then saw that neither was truer than the other. Useless! Was there any thought about them she could have whose opposite wasn’t true? She skipped a space, sighing, and wrote:

Is that what she meant? She meant that what was a door for one person wouldn’t be a door for another. She meant also that any door, once passed through, ceased to be a door ever after, could not even be returned by. She meant that no two doors ever led to the same place. She meant that there were no doors to them at all. And yet: she found, on the topmost rank of keys, an asterisk (she hadn’t known the machine carried one) and added it to her last sentence, so it read:

And beneath that she wrote:

This filled up her little notepaper, and she drew it out and read over what she had written. She saw that what she had was a sort of precis of several chapters of the last edition of the Architecture, deprived of the billowing draperies of explanation and abstraction, nude and frail but no more help than ever. She crushed it slowly in her hands, thinking she knew nothing at all and yet knew this: that the fate that awaited her and all of them awaited them here (why was she dumb to say why she knew it?), and so they must cling to this place, and not stray far from it, she supposed that she herself wouldn’t ever leave it again. It was the door, the greatest of doors, it stood Somehow, by chance or design, on the very edge or border of Elsewhere, and it would in the end he the last door that led that way. For a long time it would stand open; then for a time after that it would at least be able to be opened, or unlocked, if you had the key; but there would come a time when it would he closed for good, not be a door at all any more; and she wanted none of those whom she loved to be standing outside then.

What You Most Want

The south wind blows the fly in the fish’s mouth, says the Angler, but it didn’t seem to blow August’s well-tied and tempting examples into any. Ezra Meadows was sure that fish bite before rain; old MacDonald had always been sure they never do, and August saw that they do and don’t: they bite at the gnats and mosquitoes settling like dust-motes over the water, driven down by altering pressure (Change, said John’s ambivalent barometer) but not at the Jack Scotts and Alexandras August played over them.

Perhaps he wasn’t thinking hard eno,ugh about angling. He was trying, without exactly trying to try, to see or notice something, without exactly noticing or seeing it, that would he a clue or a message; trying to remember, at the same time as he tried to forget he had ever forgotten, how such clues or messages had used to appear, and how he had used to interpret them. He must also try not to think This is madness; nor to think that he did this only for his mother’s sake. Either thought would spoil whatever might happen. Over the water a kingfisher shot, laughing, iridescent in the sun, just above the evening which had already obscured the stream. I’m not mad, August thought.

A similarity between fishing and this other enterprise was that no matter where along the stream you stood, there seemed to be, just down there, where the stream spilled through a narrow race around stones, or just beyond the tresses of the willows, the perfect spot, the spot you had all along intended to go to. The feeling wouldn’t diminish even when, after some thought, you realized that the perfect spot was one where, a few minutes ago, you had been standing, standing and looking longingly at the spot you now stood in and wanting to be amid the long maculations of its leaf shadows, as you now were, and yet; and just as August did realize this, as his desires were so to speak in transit between There and Here, something seized his line and nearly snatched the pole from his abstracted hand.

As startled as the fish itself must be, August played him clumsily, but had him after a struggle; netted him; the leaf-shadows were absorbed into evening vagueness; the fish looked up at him with the dull astonishment of all caught fish; August removed the hook, inserted his thumb in the bony mouth, and neatly broke the fish’s neck. His thumb, when he withdrew it, was coated with slime and cold fish-blood. Without thinking, he thrust the thumb into his own mouth and sucked it. The kingfisher, making another laughing sortie just then, eyed him as he arrowed over the water and then up into a dead tree.

August, fish in his creel, went to the bank and sat, waiting. The kingfisher had laughed at him, not at the world in general, he was sure of that, a sarcastic, vindictive laugh. Well, perhaps he was laughable. The fish was not seven inches long, hardly breakfast. So? Well? “If I had to live on fish,” he said, “I’d grow a beak.”

“You shouldn’t speak,” said the kingfisher, “until you’re spoken to. There are manners, you know.”

“Sorry.”

“First I speak,” said the kingfisher, “and you wonder who it is that’s spoken to you. Then you realize it’s me; then you look at your thumb and your fish, and see that it was the fish’s blood you tasted, that allowed you to understand the voices of creatures; then we converse.”

“I didn’t mean…”

“We’ll assume it was done that way.” The kingfisher spoke in the choleric, impatient tone August would have expected from his upshot head-feathers, his thick neck, his fierce, annoyed eyes and beak: a kingfisher’s voice. Halcyon bird indeed!

“Now you address me,” the kingfisher said. “ ‘O Bird!’ you say, and make your request.”

“O Bird!” August said, opening his hands imploringly, “Tell me this: Is it okay if we have a gas station in Meadowbrook, and sell Ford cars?”

“Certainly.”

“What?”

“Certainly!”

It was so inconvenient speaking in this way to a bird, a kingfisher seated on a branch in a dead tree at no more conversational a distance than any kingfisher ever was, that August imagined the bird as seated beside him on the bank, a sort of kingfisher-like person, of a more conversable size, with his legs crossed, as August’s were. This worked well. He doubted that this kingfisher was a kingfisher at all anyway.

“Now,” said the kingfisher, still bird enough to be unable to look at August with more than one eye at a time, and that one bright and smart and pitiless, “was that all?”

“I… think so. I—”

“Yes?”

“Well, I thought there might be some objection. The noise. The smell.”

“None.”

“Oh.”

“On the other hand,” said the kingfisher—a laugh, a raucous laugh, seemed always just beneath his words—“since you’re here, and I’m here, you might ask for something else altogether.”

“What?”

“Oh, anything. What you most want.”

He had thought—right up until he had voiced his absurd request—that he was doing just that: but, with a terrible rush of heat that took his breath away, he knew that he hadn’t, and that he could. He blushed fiercely. “Well,” he said, stammering, “over in Meadowbrook, there’s, there’s a farmer, a certain farmer, and he has a daughter…”

“Yes yes yes,” said the kingfisher impatiently, as though he knew well enough what August wanted, and didn’t want to be bothered with having it spelled out circumstantially. “But let’s discuss payment first, reward after.”

“Payment?”

The kingfisher cocked his head in short, furious changes of attitude, sometimes eyeing August, sometimes the stream or the sky, as though he were trying to think of some really cutting remark in which to couch his annoyance. “Payment,” he said. “Payment, payment. It’s nothing to do with you. Let’s call it a favor, if you prefer. The return of certain property that—don’t get me wrong— I’m sure fell into your hands inadvertently. I mean—” for the briefest moment, and for the first time, the kingfisher showed something like hesitation, or trepidation “—I mean a deck of cards, playing cards. Old ones. Which you possess.”

“Violet’s?” said August.

“Those ones.”

“I’ll ask her.”

“No, no. She thinks, you see, the cards are hers. So. She mustn’t know.”

“You mean steal them?”

The kingfisher was silent. For a moment he disappeared altogether, although that may only have been August’s attention wandering from the effort of imagining him, to the enormity that he had been commanded to perform.

When he appeared again, the kingfisher seemed somewhat subdued. “Have you given any further thought to your reward?” he said, almost soothingly.

In fact he had. Even as he had grasped the fact that he could in some sense ask Amy of them (without even trying to imagine how they could make good on such a promise) he had ceased to desire her quite so intensely—small presage of what would happen when he did possess her, or anyone. But what one could he choose then? Was it possible he could ask for—“All of them,” he said in a small voice.

“All?”

“Any one I want.” If sudden horrid strength of desire hadn’t whelmed him, shame would never have allowed him to say it. “Power over them.”

“You have it.” The kingfisher cleared his throat, looking away, and combed his beard with a black claw, as though glad this unclean bargaining was done.’ “There is a certain pool up in the woods above the lake. A certain rock which juts out into the pool. Put the cards there, in their bag in their box, and take the gift you find there. Do it soon. Goodbye.”

Evening was dense yet clear, presage of a storm; the confusions of sunset were over. The pools of the stream were black, with steady glassy ribs raised by the continuous current. A black flutter of feathers in a dead tree was a kingfisher preparing for sleep. August waited on the bank till he had been returned, by an evening path, to the place he had started out from; then he gathered up his gear and went home, eyes wide and blind to the beauties of a stormgathering evening, feeling faintly sick with strangeness and expectation.

Something Horrific

The velvet bag in which Violet’s cards were kept was of a dusty rose color that had once been vivid. The box had once held a set of silver coffee-spoons from the Crystal Palace, but those had long since been sold, when she and her father wandered. To bring those strange huge oblongs drawn or printed centuries before out of this cozy box, with a picture of the old Queen and the Palace itself done on the cover in different woods, was always an odd moment, like the drawing aside of an arras in an old play to reveal something horrific.

Horrific: well, not quite, or not usually, though there were times when, as she laid out a Rose or a Banner or some other shape, she felt afraid: felt that some secret might be revealed which she didn’t want to know, her own death or something even more dreadful. But—despite the weird, minatory images of the trumps, engraved with dense black detail like Durër’s, baroque and Germanic—the secrets revealed were oftenest not terrible, oftenest not even secret: cloudy abstractions merely, oppositions, contentions, resolutions, common as proverbs and as unspecific. At least so she had been told the fall of them should be interpreted, by John and those of his acquaintance who knew card reading.

But the cards they knew weren’t these cards, exactly; and though she knew no other way of laying them out or interpreting them than as the Tarot of the Egyptians was laid out (before she was instructed in those methods she used just to turn them down anyhow and stare at them, often for hours) she often wondered if there weren’t some more revelatory, simpler, Somehow more useful manipulation of them she could make.

“And here is,” she said, turning one up carefully top to bottom, “a Five of Wands.”

“New possibilities,” Nora said. “New acquaintances. Surprising developments.”

“All right.” The Five of Wands went in its place in the Horseshoe Violet was making. She chose from another pile—the cards had been sorted, by arcane distribution, into six piles before her—and turned a trump: it was the Sportsman.

This was the difficulty. Like the usual deck, Violet’s contained a set of twenty-one major trumps; but hers—persons, places, things, notions—were not the Greater Trumps at all. And so when the Bundle, or the Traveler, or Convenience, or Multiplicity, or the Sportsman fell, a leap had to be made, meanings guessed at which made sense of the spread. Over the years, with growing certainty, she had assigned meanings to her trumps, made inferences from the way in which they fell among the cups and swords and wands, and discerned—or seemed to discern—their influences, malign or beneficent. But she could never be sure. Death, the Moon, Judgement— those greater trumps had large and obvious significance; what did one make though of the Sportsman?

He was, like all people pictured in her cards, musclebound in a not quite human way and striking an absurd, orgulous pose, toes turned out and knuckles on hip. He seemed certainly overdressed for what he was about, with ribbons at his knees, slashes in his jacket, and a wreath of dying flowers around his broad hat; but that was for sure a fishing pole over his shoulder. He carried something like a creel, and other impedimenta she didn’t understand; and a dog, who looked a lot like Spark, lay asleep at his feet. It was Grandy who called this figure the Sportsman; underneath him was written in Roman capitals P I S C A T O R.

“So,” Violet said, “new experiences, and good times, or adventures outdoors, for someone. That’s nice.”

“For who?” Nora asked.

“For whom.”

“Well, for whom?”

“For whomever we’re reading this spread for. Did we decide? Or is this only practice?”

“Since it’s coming out so well,” Nora said, “let’s say it’s for someone.”

“August.” Poor August, something good ought to be in store for him.

“All right.” But before Violet could turn another card, Nora said “Wait. We shouldn’t joke with it. I mean if it didn’t start being August—what if we turn up something awful? Wouldn’t we worry it might come true?” She looked out over the tangled spread, feeling apprehensive for the first time before their power. “Do they always come true?”

“I don’t know.” She stopped dealing them out. “No,” she said. “Not ftr us. I think they might predict things that could happen to us. But—well, we’re protected, aren’t we?”

Nora said nothing to this. She believed Violet, and believed Violet knew the Tale in ways she couldn’t imagine; but she had never felt herself to be protected.

“There are catastrophes,” Violet said, “of an ordinary kind, that if the cards predicted them I wouldn’t believe them.”

“And you correct my grammar!” Nora said, laughing. Violet, laughing too, turned the next card: the Four of Cups, reversed.

“Weariness. Disgust. Aversion,” Nora said. “Bitter experience.”

Below, the ratchety doorbell rang. Nora leapt up.

“Now, who could that be?” Violet said, sweeping up the cards.

“Oh,” Nora said, “I don’t know.” She had gone to the mirror hastily, and pushed her heavy golden hair quickly into place, and smoothed her blouse. “It might be Harvey Cloud, who said he might stop by to return a book I loaned him.” She stopped her hurry, and sighed, as though annoyed at the interruption. “I guess I’d better go see.”

“Yes,” Violet said. “You go see. We’ll do this again another day.”

But when, a week later, Nora asked for another lesson, and Violet went to the drawer where her cards were kept, they weren’t there. Nora insisted she hadn’t taken them. They weren’t in any other place that Violet might absentmindedly have put them. With half her drawers turned out and papers and boxes littering the floor from her search, she sat on the edge of the bed, puzzled and a little alarmed.

“Gone,” she said.

Anthology of Love

“I’ll do what you want, August,” Amy said. “Whatever you want.”

He bent his head down onto his upraised knees and said “Oh, Jesus, Amy. Oh, God, I’m so sorry.”

“Oh, don’t swear so, August, it’s terrible.” Her face was as misty and tearful as the shorn October cornfield in their view, where blackbirds hunted corn, rising at unseen signals and settling again elsewhere. She put her harvestchapped hands on his. They both shivered, from the cold and from chill circumstance. “I’ve read in books and such that for a while people love people and then they don’t any more. I never knew why.

“I don’t know why either, Amy.”

“I’ll always love you.”

He raised his head, so flooded with melancholy and tender regret that he seemed to have turned to mist and autumn himself. He’d loved her intensely before, but never so purely as now when he told her he wouldn’t be seeing her any more.

“I just wonder why,” she said.

He couldn’t tell her it was mostly a matter of scheduling, nothing to do with her really, only the most pressing engagements he had elsewhere—oh Lord, pressing, pressing… He had met her here, beneath the brown bracken, at dawn when she wouldn’t be missed at home, to break off with her, and the only acceptable and honorable reason he could think of for that was that he didn’t love her any more, and so that was the reason which, after long hesitations and many cold kisses, he had given her. But when he did so, she was so brave, so acquiescent, the tears that rolled down her cheeks so salty, that it seemed to him that he’d said it only to see how good, how loyal, how meek she was; to animate with sadness and imminent loss his own flagging feelings.

“Oh, don’t Amy, Amy, I never meant…” He held her, and she yielded, shy to trespass where he had only a moment ago said she was forbidden, not wanted; and her shyness, her big eyes searching him, afraid and wildly hopeful, undid him.

“You shouldn’t, August, if you don’t love me.”

“Don’t say it, Amy, don’t.”

Near to weeping himself, just as though he truly wouldn’t ever see her again (though he knew now he must and would), on the rustling leaves he entered with her into new sad sweet lands of love, where the awful hurts he had inflicted on her were healed.

There was no end to Love’s geography, apparently.

“Next Sunday? August?” Timid, but sure now.

“No. Not next Sunday. But… Tomorrow. Or tonight. Can you…”

“Yes. I’ll think of a way. Oh, August. Sweetness.”

She ran, wiping her face, pinning her hair, late, in danger, happy, across the field. This, he thought, in some last resisting stronghold of his soul, is what I’ve come to: even the end of love is only another spur to love. He went the other way to where his car, reproachful, awaited him. The mist-sodden squirrel tail that now adorned it hung limply on its staff. Trying not to think, he cranked the car into life.

What the hell was he to do anyway?

He had thought that the ardent sword of feeling that had gone through him when he first saw Amy Meadows after acquiring his gift was only the certainty that desire was at last to be fulfilled. But he proceeded to make a fool of himself over her, certainty or no certainty; he braved her father, he told desperate lies and was nearly caught out in them, he waited hours on the cold ground beyond her house for her to free herself—they had promised him power over women, he realized bitterly, but not over their circumstances—and though Amy acceded to all his plans, his nighttime meetings, his schemes, and matched his importunities one for one, not even her shamelessness lessened his sense of not being at all in charge here, but at the beck and call of desire more demanding, less a part of himself and more a demon that rode him, than he had been before.

The sense grew, over the months, as he wheeled the Ford around the five towns, to a certainty: he drove the Ford, but was himself driven, steered, and shifted without let.

Violet didn’t inquire why he had dropped the notion of building a garage in Meadowbrook. Now and then he complained to her that he used almost as much gas getting to and from the nearest garage as he put in his tank when he got there, but this didn’t seem to be a hint or an argument, in fact he seemed less argumentative altogether than he had been. It might be, she thought, that his almost haggard air of being concerned quite elsewhere meant that he was hatching some even more unlikely scheme, but Somehow she thought not; she hoped that what appeared to be guilty exhaustion in his face and voice when he lounged silent at home didn’t mean he was practicing some secret vice; certainly something had happened. The cards might have told her what, but the cards were gone. It was probably, she thought, only that he was in love.

That was true. If Violet hadn’t chosen to seclude herself in an upstairs room, she would have had a notion of the swath her younger son was cutting through the young girls, the standing harvest of the pentacle of five towns around Edgewood. Their parents knew, a little; the girls themselves, among themselves, told of it; among them a glimpse of August’s T, with the bright jaunty squirrel tail flying from a whippy rod at the windscreen, meant a day’s consternation, a night’s hot tossing, a wet pillow in the morning; they didn’t know—how could they guess? All their hearts were his—that August’s days and nights were spent much as theirs were.

He hadn’t expected this. He had heard of Casanova, but hadn’t read him. He had imagined harems, the peremptory clap of a sultan’s hands which brings the acquiescent object of desire as quickly and impersonally as a dime brought a chocolate soda at the drugstore. He was astounded when, without his mad desire for Amy lessening in the slightest, he fell deeply in love with the Flowers’ eldest daughter. Ravened by love and lewdness, he thought of her continually, when he wasn’t with Amy; or when he wasn’t thinking about—how could it be—little Margaret Juniper, who wasn’t even fourteen. He learned, though slowly, what all great harrowed lovers learn: that love is what most surely compels love—is perhaps, except for brute force, the only thing that does, though only (and this was the terrible gift he had been given) when the lover truly believes, as August could, that when his love is strong enough it must surely be returned—and August’s was.

When, with shame in his heart and trembling hands he had laid down by the rock pool what he had tried to deny to himself was his mother’s most precious possession, the cards, and picked up what lay there for him, only a squirrel’s tail and probably no gift at all but only the remnants of an owl’s or a fox’s breakfast, this is madness, it was only the dense weight of virgin hope that had allowed him to tie it to his Ford, expecting nothing. But they had kept their promise, oh they had, he was on the way to becoming an entire anthology of love, with footnotes (there were a pair of step-ins under his seat, he could not remember who had stepped out of them); only, as he drove from drugstore to church, from farmhouse to farmhouse, with the hairy thing flying from his windscreen, he came to know that it did not and had not ever contained his power over women: his power over women lay in their power over him.

Darker Before It Lightened

The Flowers came on Wednesdays, usually, bringing armloads of blossoms for Violet’s room, and though Violet always felt somewhat ashamed and guilty in the presence of so many decapitated and slowly expiring blooms, she tried to express admiration and wonder at Mrs. Flowers’ green thumb. But this visit was Tuesday, and there were no flowers.

“Come in, come in,” Violet said. They were standing, unwontedly shy, at her bedroom door. “Will you take some tea?”

“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Flowers. “Just a few words.”

But when they were seated, exchanging glances with one another (though unable apparently to look at Violet) they said nothing for an uncomfortably long time.

The Flowers had come up just after the War to take Mr. MacGregor’s old place, “fleeing,” as Mrs. Flowers put it, the City; Mr. Flowers had had position and money there, but just what position wasn’t clear, and how it had made him money was even less clear, not because they chose to hide it but because they seemed to find commonplaces of daily life hard to converse about intelligibly. They had been members with John of the Theosophical Society; they were both in love with Violet. Like John’s, their lives were full of quiet drama, full of vague yet thrilling signs that life was not as the common run supposed it to be; they were among those (it surprised Violet how many there were, and how many gravitated toward Edgewood) who watch life as though it were a great drab curtain which they are sure is always about to rise on some terrific and exquisite spectacle, and though it never did quite rise, they were patient, and noted excitedly every small movement of it as the actors took their places, strained to hear the unimaginable setting being shifted.

Like John, they supposed Violet to be one of those actors, or at least to have been behind the curtain. That she couldn’t see it that way at all made her only the more cryptic and entrancing to them. Their Wednesday visits made matter for a whole evening’s quiet talk, inspiration for a whole week’s reverent and watchful life.

But this wasn’t Wednesday.

“It’s about happiness,” Mrs. Flowers said, and Violet had to stare puzzled at her for a moment until she reheard this as “It’s about Happiness,” the name of their eldest daughter. The younger ones were named Joy and Spirit. The same confusion happened when their names came up: our Joy is gone for the day; our Spirit came home covered with mud. Folding her hands and raising eyes that Violet now saw were red from weeping, Mrs. Flowers said, “Happiness is pregnant.”

“Oh my.”

Mr. Flowers, who with his thin boyish beard and great sensitive brow reminded Violet of Shakespeare, began speaking so softly and indirectly that Violet had to lean forward to hear. She got the gist: Happiness was pregnant, so Happiness had said, by her son August.

“She cried all night,” Mrs. Flowers said, her own eyes filling. Mr. Flowers explained, or tried to. It wasn’t that they believed in worldly shame or honor, their own marriage bond had been sealed before any words or formulas had been spoken; the flowering of vital energies is always to be welcomed. No: it was that August, well, didn’t seem to understand it the way they did, or perhaps he understood it better, but anyway to speak frankly they thought he’d broken the girl’s heart, though she said he said he loved her; they wondered if Violet knew what August felt, or—or if she knew (the phrase, so loaded with common and wrong meaning, fell out anyway, with a clang, like a horseshoe he had had in his pocket) what the boy intended to do about this.

Violet moved her mouth, as though in answer, but no answer came out. She composed herself. “If he loves her,” she said, “then…”

“He may,” Mr. Flowers said. “But he says—she says he says—that there’s someone else, someone with, well, a prior claim, someone…”

“He’s promised to another,” Mrs. Flowers said. “Who’s also, well.”

“Amy Meadows?” Violet said.

“No, no. That wasn’t the name. Was that the name?”

Mr. Flowers coughed. “Happiness wasn’t sure, exactly. There might be… more than one.”

Violet could only say “Oh dear, oh dear,” feeling deeply their consternation, their brave effort not to censure, and having no idea how to answer them. They looked at her with hope, hope that she would say something that would fit all this too into the drama they perceived. But in the end she could only say, in a tiny voice, with a desperate smile, “Well, I suppose it’s not the first time it ever happened in the world.”

“Not the first time?”

“I mean not the first time.”

Their hearts leapt up. She did know: she knew precedents for this. What could they be? Krishna fluting, seed-scattering, spiritincarnating—avatars—what? Something they had no inkling of? Yes, brighter and stranger than they could know. “Not the first time,” said Mr. Flowers, his unlined brow raised. “Yes.”

“Is it,” said Mrs. Flowers, almost whispering, “part of the Tale?”

“Is what? Oh, yes,” Violet said, lost in thought. What had become of Amy? What on earth was August up to? Where had he found the daring to break girls’ hearts? A dread came over her. “Only I didn’t know this, I never suspected… Oh, August,” she said, and bowed her head. Was this their doing? How could she know? Could she ask him? Would his answer tell her?

Seeing her so lost, Mr. Flowers leaned forward. “We never, never meant to burden you,” he said. “It wasn’t—it wasn’t that we didn’t think, that we weren’t sure it wasn’t, or wouldn’t be, all right. Happiness doesn’t blame him, I mean it’s not that.”

“No,” said Mrs. Flowers, and put her hand gently on Violet’s arm. “We didn’t want anything. It wasn’t that. A new spirit is always a joy. She’ll be ours.”

“Maybe,” Violet said, “it’ll be clearer later.”

“I’m sure,” Mrs. Flowers said. “It is, it is part of the Tale.”

But Violet had seen that it would not be clearer later. The Tale: yes, this was part of the. Tale, but she had suddenly seen, as a person alone in a room reading or working at the end of day sees, as she raises her eyes from work that has for some reason grown obscure and difficult, that evening has come, and that’s the reason; and that it would long grow darker before it lightened.

“Please,” she said, “have tea. We’ll light the lights. Stay awhile.”

Outside she could hear—they could all hear—a car, chugging steadily toward the house. It slowed as it approached the drive—its voice was distinct and regular, like the crickets’—and changed gears like changing its mind, and chugged onward.

How long is the Tale? she had asked, and Mrs. Underhill had said: you and your children and your children’s children will all be buried before that Tale’s all told.

She took hold of the lamp cord, but for a moment didn’t pull it. What had she done? Was this her fault, because she hadn’t believed the Tale could be so long? It was. She would change. She would correct what she could, if there were time. There must be time. She pulled the cord, which made the windows night, and the room a room.

The Last Day of August

The enormous moon which August had taken Margaret Juniper out to see rise had risen, though they hadn’t noticed its ascent. The harvest moon, August had insisted this was, and had sung a song about it to Marge as they sped along; but it wasn’t the harvest moon, amber and huge and plenteous as it was, that would be next month’s; this was only the last day of August.

Its light was on them. They could look at it now, August was too dazed and replete to do anything else, even to comfort Marge who wept quietly—perhaps, who could tell, even happily—beside him. He couldn’t speak. He wondered if he would ever speak again, except to invite, except to propose. Maybe if he kept his mouth shut… But he knew he wouldn’t.

Marge raised a moonlit hand, and stroked the moustache he had begun to grow, laughing through her tears. “It’s so handsome,” she said. He twitched his nose like a rabbit under her fingers. Why do they always rub it wrong, turn it uncomfortably underside-over, should he shave it so they can’t? Her mouth was red and the flesh around it flushed from kissing and from weeping. Her skin against his was as soft as he had imagined it would be, but flecked with pinkish freckles he hadn’t expected, not her slim white thighs though, bare on the sweat-slick leather of the seat. Within her opened blouse her breasts were small and new-looking, capped with large changeable nipples, seeming to have just been extruded from a boyish chest. The little hair was blond and stiff and small, like a dot. Oh God the privacies he had seen. He felt the strangeness of unbound flesh strongly. They ought to be kept hidden, these vulnerabilities, these oddities and organs soft as a snail’s body or its tender horns, the exposure of them was monstrous, he wanted to recase hers in the pretty white underthings that hung around the car like festoons, and yet even as he thought this be began to rise again.

“Oh,” she said. She hadn’t, probably, got much of a gander at his engorgement in the rush of her deflowering, too much else to think about. “Do you do it right away again?”

He made no answer, it had nothing to do with him. As well ask the trout struggling on the hook if he liked to go on with that activity or cease it. A bargain is a bargain. He did wonder why, though one knows a woman better and she has picked up anyway the rudiments, the second time often seems more difficult, more illfitting, more a matter of inconvenient knees and elbows, than the first. None of this prevented his falling, as they coupled, more deeply in love with her, but he hadn’t expected it to. So various they are, bodies, breasts, odors, he hadn’t known about that, that they would be as individual, as charged with character, as faces and voices. He was surfeited with so much character. He knew too much. He groaned aloud with love and knowledge, and clung to her.

It was late, the moon had shrunk and grown chill and white as it climbed the sky. With how sad steps. Her tears fell again, though she didn’t seem to be exactly weeping, they seemed a natural secretion, drawn forth by the moon perhaps; she was busy putting away her nakedness, though she couldn’t take it back from him any more. She said to him calmly: “I’m glad, August. That we had this one time.”

“What do you mean?” A hoarse beast’s voice, not his own. “This one time?”

She brushed the tears from her face with the flat of her hand, she couldn’t see to fasten her garters. “Because I can always remember this now.”

“No.”

“At least remember this.” She threw her dress into the air, very agilely causing it to settle over her head; she wiggled, and it descended over her like a curtain, the last act. “August, no.” She shrank against the door, clasping her hands togeher, drawing up her shoulders. “Because you don’t love me, and that’s all right. No. I know about Sara Stone. Everybody knows. It’s all right.”

“Who?”

“Don’t you dare.” She looked at him warningly. He wasn’t to spoil this with lies, with coarse denials. “You love her. That’s true and you know it.” He said nothing. It was true. A collision was taking place inside him of such magnitude he could only witness it. The noise of it made it hard to hear her. “I’ll never ever do it with anyone else, ever.” Her bravery exhausted, her lip began to tremble. “I’m going to go off and live with Jeff, and I’ll never love anyone else, and just remember this always.” Jeff was her kindly brother, a rose gardener. She turned her face away. “You can take me home now.”

He took her home, without another word.

Being filled with clamor is like being void. Void, he watched her climb down from the car, watched her shatter the moonshadows of leaves and be shattered by them as she went away, not looking back, he would not have seen her if she had looked. Void, he drove away from the shaded, shuddering crossroads. Void, he drove toward home. It didn’t feel like a decision, it felt like void, when he turned off the gray pebble-glittering road, bounced through the ditch, climbed a bank, and steered the Ford (dauntless, unfazed) out into the silvered pond of an uncut pasture, and then further on, the void slowly filling with resolution that felt also like void.

The car sputtered out of gas: He choked it, prodded it, urged it a little further, but it died. If there was a God damn garage within ten miles of here it would be convenient as hell. He sat for a while in the cooling car, imagining his destination without exactly thinking about it. He did wonder (last lamplit window of common thought, flickering out) if Marge would think he’d done it for her. Well he would have, in a way, in a way, he would have to put stones in his pockets, heavy ones, and just relax. Wash it all away. The thunder of void resolution was like the cold thunder of the falls, he seemed already to hear it, and wondered if he would hear nothing else through eternity; he hoped not.

He got out of the car, detached the squirrel tail, it ought to be returned, maybe they would Somehow return the payment he had made for it; and, slipping and stumbling in his patent-leather seducer’s shoes, he made for the woods.

Strange Way to Live

“Mother?” Nora said, astonished, stopping in the hall with an empty cup and saucer in her hands. “What are you doing up?”

Violet stood on the stairs, having made no sound coming down that Nora heard; she was dressed, in clothes which Nora hadn’t seen for years, but she had the air of someone asleep, somnambulating.

“No word,” she said, as though sure there would not be, “about August?”

“No. No, no word.”

Two weeks had passed since a neighbor had told them of seeing August’s Ford abandoned in a field, open to the elements. Auberon, after long hesitation, had suggested to Violet that they call the police; but this notion was so far from anything Violet could imagine about what had happened that he doubted she even heard: no fate August was resefved to could possibly be altered, or even discovered, by police.

“It’s my fault, you know,” she said in a small voice. “Whatever it is that’s happened. Oh, Nora.”

Nora rushed up the stairs to where Violet had sat down suddenly as though fallen. She took Violet’s arm to help her rise, but Violet only grasped the hand she offered and squeezed it, as though it were Nora who needed comforting. Nora sat beside her on the stair. “I’ve been so wrong,” Violet said, “so stupid and wrong. And now see what’s come of it.”

“No,” Nora said. “What do you mean?”

“I didn’t see,” Violet said. “I thought… Listen now, Nora. I want to go to the City. I want to see Timmie and Alex, and have a long visit, and see the baby. Will you come?”

“Of course,” Nora said. “But…”

“All right. And Nora. Your young man.”

“What young man?” She looked away.

“Henry. Harvey. You mightn’t think I know, but I do. I think—I think you and he should—should do what you like. If ever anything I said made you think I didn’t want you to, well, it’s not so. You must do exactly as you like. Marry him, and move away…”

“But I don’t want to move away.”

“Poor Auberon, I suppose it’s too late—he’s missed his war now, and…”

“Mother,” Nora said, “what are you talking about?”

She was silent a time. Then: “It’s my own fault,” she said. “I didn’t think. It’s very hard though, you know, to know a little, or to guess a little, and not want to—to help, or to see that things come out right; it’s hard not to be afraid, not to think some small thing— oh, the smallest—that you might do would spoil it. But that’s not so, is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“It isn’t. You see”—she clasped her pale, thin hands together, and closed her eyes—“it is a Tale. Only it’s longer and stranger than we imagine. Longer and stranger than we can imagine. So what you must do—” she opened her eyes “—what you must do, and what I must do, is forget.”

“Forget what?”

“Forget a Tale is being told. Otherwise—oh, don’t you see, if we didn’t know the little that we do, we’d never interfere, never get things wrong; but we do know, only not enough; and so we guess wrong, and get entangled, and have to be put right in ways—in ways so odd, so—oh, dear, poor August, the smelliest, noisiest garage would have been better, I know it would have been…”

“But what about a special fate, and all that,” Nora said, alarmed at her mother’s distress, “and being Protected, and all?”

“Yes,” Violet said. “Perhaps. But it doesn’t matter, because we can’t understand that, or what it means. So we have to forget.”

“How can we?”

“We can’t.” She stared straight in front of her. “But we can be silent. And we can be clever against our knowledge. And we can—oh, it’s so strange, such a strange way to live—we can keep secrets. Can’t we? Can you?”

“I think. I don’t know.”

“Well, you must learn. So must I. So must we all. Never to tell what you know, or think, because it’s never enough, and it won’t be true anyway for anyone but you, not in the same way; and never hope, or be afraid; and never, never take their side against us, and still, Somehow, I don’t know how, trust them. We must do that from now on.”

“How long?”

Before Violet could answer this, if she could, or would, the door of the library, which they could see through the fat banisters, opened a crack, and a wan face looked out, and withdrew.

“Who’s that?” Violet asked.

“Amy Meadows,” Nora said, and blushed.

“What’s she doing in the library?”

“She came looking for August. She says—” Nora now clasped her hands and shut her eyes “—she says she’s going to have August’s baby. And she wondered where he was.”

The Seed. She thought of Mrs. Flowers: Is it the Tale? Hopeful, astonished, glad. She nearly laughed, giddily. “Well, so do I, she said. So do I. She leaned out between the banisters and said, “Come out, dear. Don’t be afraid.”

The door opened, just enough to let Amy pass, and though she shut it behind her softly, it boomed resoundingly as it latched. “Oh,” she said, not having at first recognized the woman on the stair, “Mrs. Drinkwater.”

“Come up,” Violet said. She patted her lap, as she might to attract a kitten. Amy mounted the stairs to where they sat halfway to the landing. Her dress was homemade, and her stockings were thick, and she was even prettier than Violet remembered. “Now. What is it?”

Amy sat on the stair below them, a miserable huddle, with a big loose bag in her lap, like a runaway’s. “August’s not here,” she said.

“No. We… don’t know where he is, exactly. Amy, now everything’s going to be all right. You’re not to worry.”

“It’s not,” Amy said softly. “It’s not going to ever be all right again.” She looked up at Violet. “Did he run off?”

“I think he did.” She put her arm around Amy. “But he’ll come back, possibly, probably…” She brushed Amy’s hair aside which had fallen lankly and sadly over her cheek. “You must go home now for a while, you see, and not worry, and everything will turn out for the best, you’ll see.”

At that Amy’s shoulders began to heave, softly and slowly. “Can’t,” she said, in a small high weeping voice. “Daddy’s put me out. He’s sent me away.” Slowly, as though unable not to, she turned and put her sobbing head in Violet’s lap. “I didn’t come to bother him. I didn’t. I don’t care, he was wonderful and good, he was, I’d do it all again and I wouldn’t bother him, only I got no place to go at all. No place to go.”

“Well, well,” Violet said, “well, well.” She exchanged a glance with Nora, whose eyes had filled too. “Of course you have a place. Of course you do. You’ll stay here, that’s all. I’m sure your father will change his mind, the silly old fool, you can stay here as long as you need to. Now don’t cry any more, Amy, don’t. Here.” She took a lace-edged hanky from her sleeve, and made the girl look up and use it, looking levelly into her eyes to stiffen her. “Now. That’s better. As long as you like. Will that be all right?”

“Yes.” Still a squeak was all she could manage, but her shoulders had stopped heaving. She smiled a little, ashamed. Nora and Violet smiled for her. “Oh,” she said, sniffing, “I almost forgot.” She tried with trembling fingers to undo her bundle, dabbed her face again and gave Violet back her sodden hanky, not much help for storms like Amy’s, and managed to work open the bundle. “A man gave me something to give you. On my way here.” She rooted among her belongings. “He seemed real mad. He said to say, ‘If you people can’t keep your bargains, there’s no use dealing with you at all.’ She drew out and placed in Violet’s hands a box that bore on its cover a picture of Queen Victoria and the Crystal Palace, done in different woods.

“Maybe he was joking,” Amy said. “A funny, birdy man. He winked at me. Is it yours?”

Violet held the box, whose weight told her that the cards, or something like them, were within.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t know.”

There were footsteps climbing the stairs of the porch just then, and the three of them fell silent. The footsteps crossed the porch, with a squishy squeak as though sodden. Violet took Amy’s hand, and Nora Violet’s. The screen-door spring sang, and there was a figure against the cloudy oval glass of the door.

Auberon opened the door. He wore waders, and an old hat of John’s stuck full of flies. He was whistling as he came into the hall, about packing up your troubles in an old kit bag, but stopped when he saw the three women huddled on the stair, inexplicably, halfway to the landing.

“Well!” he said. “What’s up? Any word from August?” They didn’t answer, and he held up to show them four fat speckled trout neatly strung. “Supper!” he said, and for a moment they were all motionless, a tableau, he with the fish, they with their thoughts, the rest only watching and waiting.

No Catching Up

The cards had altered in their time elsewhere, Violet found, though just how she couldn’t at first define. What meaning they had once had seemed to have clouded over, to have become powdered or dusty with obscurity; the patent, even funny quadrilles of meaning the figures had once joined hands in whenever she laid them out, the Oppositions and Influences and so on—they would have none of it any more. It was only after she and Nora had investigated them for a long time that she discovered that they had not lost power but gained it: they could no longer do what they had done, but they could, if interpreted correctly, predict with great accuracy the small events of Drinkwater daily life: gifts, and colds, and sprains; the itineraries of absent loved ones; whether it would rain on a picnic—that sort of thing. Only now and again did the deck throw up anything more startling. But it was a great help. They would grant us that, Violet thought; that gift in exchange… In fact she supposed (much later on) that to bestow this diurnal exactness of her deck was why they had taken it from her in the first place, unless they just couldn’t help bestowing it. There was no catching up with them, no, not ever.

August’s offspring would in the course of time be settled around the five towns, some with their mothers and grandmothers, some with others, changing names and families as they moved, as in a game of musical chairs: when the music stopped, in fact, two of the children (by a process so charged with emotion, and so complex in its jointure of shame, regret, love, indifference and kindliness that the participants would never be able to agree later on how it had happened) had changed places in two different dishonored households.

When Smoky Barnable came to Edgewood, August’s descendants, disguised under several names, had come to the dozens. There were Flowers, and Stones, and Weeds; Charles Wayne was a grandson. One though, left out in the game, had found no seat: that was Amy’s. She stayed at Edgewood, while in what she called her tummy there grew a boy, recapitulating in his ontogeny the many beasts, tadpole, fish, salamander, mouse, whose lives he would later describe in endless detail. They called him John Storm: John after his grandfather, but Storm after his father and his mother.

Jolly, round, red Mr. Sun lifted his cloudy head over the purple mountains and cast long, long rays down into the Green Meadow.” Robin Bird read it out in a proud, piping voice; he knew this book almost by heart. “Not far from the Stone Fence that separates the Green Meadow from the Old Pasture, a family of Meadow Mice awoke in their tiny house in the grass, Mother, Father, and six pink, blind babies.

Robin Bird’s Lesson

“The head of the household rolled over, opened his eyes, twitched his whiskers, and went out to the doorstep to wash his face in the dew caught in a fallen leaf. As he stood there looking out at the Green Meadow and the morning, Old Mother West-wind hurried by, tickling his nose and bringing him news of the Wild Wood, the Laughing Brook, the Old Pasture and the Great World all around him, confused and clamorous news, better than any Times at breakfast.

“The news was the same as it had been for many days now: the world is changing! Soon things will be very different than you smell them today! Prepare yourself, Meadow Mouse!

“The Meadow Mouse, when he had learned as much as he could from the coy Little Breezes that travel in Mother West-wind’s company, scampered along one of his many paths through the long grass to the Stone Fence, where he knew of a place he could sit and see hut not be seen. When he had come to this secret place, he settled back, thrust a grass-spear between his teeth, and chewed thoughtfully.

“What was the great change in the world that Mother West-wind and all her Little Breezes talked of these days? What did it mean, and how was he to prepare himself?

“To the Meadow Mouse, the Green Meadow could not have been a better place to live than it was just then. All the grasses of the meadow were pouring forth their seed for him to eat. Many plants that he had thought were nasty had suddenly unfolded dry pods of sweet nuts for him to gnaw on with his strong teeth. The Meadow Mouse was happy and well-fed.

“And now was all that to change? He wondered and puzzled and thought, but he could make no sense of it.

“You see, children, the Meadow Mouse had been bom in the Springtime. He had grown up in the Summer when Mr. Sun smiles his broadest and takes his time to cross the blue, blue sky. All in the space of that single Summer, he had grown to his full size (which wasn’t very great), and had married, and had babies born to him; soon they too would be grown.

“Now can you guess what the great change was, that the Meadow Mouse couldn’t possibly know about?”

All the younger children called out and waved their hands, because unlike the older children they thought they were actually supposed to guess.

“Okay,” Smoky said, “everybody knows. Thank you, Robin. Now let’s see. Can you read for a while, Billy?” Billy Bush stood up, less confident than Robin, and took the battered book from him.

The End of the World

“Well,” he read, “the Meadow Mouse decided he had better ask someone older and wiser than himself. The wisest creature he knew was the Black Crow, who came to the Green Meadow sometimes in search of grain or grubs, and always had a remark to make to anyone who would listen. The Meadow Mouse always listened to what the Black Crow had to say, though he stayed well away from the Black Crow’s glittering eye and long, sharp beak. The Crow family was not known for eating mice, but on the other hand they were known to eat almost anything that came to hand, or to beak you might say.

“The Meadow Mouse had not been sitting and thinking for very long when out of the blue sky came a heavy flapping of wings and a raucous call, and the Black Crow himself landed in the Green Meadow not far from where the Meadow Mouse sat!

“ ‘Good Morning, Mr. Crow,’ the Meadow Mouse called out, feeling quite safe in his snuggery in the wall.

“ ‘Is it a good morning?’ said the Black Crow. ‘Not many more days you’ll be saying that.’

“ ‘Now that’s just what I wanted to ask you about,’ the Meadow Mouse said. ‘It seems that a great change is coming over the world. Do you feel it? Do you know what it is?’

“ ‘Ah, foolish Youth!’ said the Black Crow. ‘There is indeed a change coming. It is called Winter, and you’d better prepare for it.’

“ ‘What will it be like? How shall I prepare for it?’

“With a glint in his eye, as though he enjoyed the Meadow Mouse’s discomfort, the Black Crow told him about Winter: how cruel Brother North-wind would come sweeping over the Green Meadow and the Old Pasture, turning the leaves gold and brown and blowing them from the trees; how the grasses would die and the animals that lived on them grow thin with hunger. He told how the cold rains would fall and flood the houses of small creatures like the Meadow Mouse. He described the snow, which sounded rather wonderful to the Meadow Mouse; but then he learned of the terrible cold that would bite him to the bone, and how the small birds would grow weak with cold and tumble frozen from their perches, and the fish would stop swimming and the Laughing Brook laugh no more because its mouth was stopped with ice.

“ ‘But it’s the End of the World,’ cried the Meadow Mouse in despair.

“ ‘So it would seem,’ said the Black Crow gaily. “For some folks. Not for me. I’ll get by. But you had better prepare yourself, Meadow Mouse, if you expect to stay among the living!’

“And with that the Black Crow flapped his heavy wings and took to the air, leaving the Meadow Mouse more puzzled and much more afraid than he had been before.

“But as he sat there chewing his grass-blade in the warmth of the kindly Sun, he saw how he might learn to survive the awful cold that Brother North-wind was bringing to the world.”

“Okay, Billy. You know,” Smoky said, “you don’t have to say ‘thee’ every time you say ‘the,’ t-h-e. Just say ‘the,’ like you do when you’re talking.”

Billy Bush looked at him as though for the first time understanding that the word on paper and the word he said all day were the same. “The,” he said.

“Right. Now who’s next?”

Brother North wind’s Secret

“What he thought he would do,” Terry Ocean read (too old really for this, Smoky thought), “was to go around the Great World as far as he could go and ask every creature how he intended to prepare himself for the coming Winter. He was so pleased with this plan that he filled himself full of the seeds and nuts that were so sadly plentiful all around, said goodbye to his wife and children, and set off that very noon.

“The first creature he came to was a fuzzy caterpillar on a twig. Though caterpillars are not known for being clever, the Meadow Mouse put the question to him anyway: What would he do to prepare himself for the Winter that’s coming?

“ ‘I don’t know about Winter, whatever that may be,’ the caterpillar said in his tiny voice. ‘A change is certainly coming over me, though. I intend to wrap myself up in this lovely white silken thread I seem to have just learned how to spin, don’t ask me how; and when I’m all wrapped up and stuck well on to this comfortable twig, I’ll spend a long time there. Maybe forever. I don’t know.’

“Well, that didn’t seem like much of a solution to the Meadow Mouse, and with pity in his heart for the foolish caterpillar, he went on with his journey.

“Down at the Lily Pond, he met creatures he had never seen there before: great gray-brown birds with long graceful necks and black beaks. There were many of them, and they sailed across the Lily Pond dipping theirdong heads beneath the water and eating what they found there. ‘Birds!’ said the Meadow Mouse. ‘Winter’s coming! How do you intend to prepare yourselves?’

“ ‘Winter’s coming indeed,’ said an old bird in a solemn voice. ‘Brother North-wind has chased us from our homes. There the cold is already sharp. He’s at out backs now, hurrying us on. We’ll outfly him, though, fast as he is! We’ll fly to the South, farther South than he’s allowed to go; and there we’ll be safe from Winter.’

“ ‘How far?’ the Meadow Mouse asked, hoping perhaps he could outrun Brother North-wind too.

“ ‘Days and days and days, flying as fast as we can,’ said the old one. ‘We’re late already.’ And with a great beating of his wings he arose from the pond, tucking his black feet neatly against his white stomach. The others rose up after him, and together they flew off honking toward the warm South.

“The Meadow Mouse went on sadly, knowing he couldn’t outrun the winter on broad strong wings like theirs. So absorbed was he in these thoughts that he nearly stumbled over a brown Mud Turtle at the Lily Pond’s edge. The Meadow Mouse asked him what he would do when the Winter came.

“ ‘Sleep,’ said the Mud Turtle sleepily, wrinkled like an old brown man. ‘I’ll wrap myself in the warm mud deeper than Winter can reach, and sleep. In fact I’m getting sleepy now.’

“Sleep! That didn’t sound like much of an answer to the Meadow Mouse. But as he continued on his way, he was to hear the same answer from many different creatures.

“ ‘Sleep!’ said the Grass Snake, the Meadow Mouse’s enemy. ‘You’ll have nothing to fear from me, Meadow Mouse.’

“ ‘Sleep!’ said the Brown Bear. ‘In a cave or a strong house of branches. Sleep for good.’

“ ‘Sleep,’ squeaked his cousin the Bat when evening came. ‘Sleep upside down, hanging by my toes.’

“Well! Half the world was simply going to go to sleep when Winter came. This was the oddest answer the Meadow Mouse heard, but there were many others too.

“ ‘I’ll store nuts and seeds in secret places,’ said the Red Squirrel. ‘That’s how I’ll get by.’

“ ‘I’ll trust the People to feed me when there’s nothing left,’ said the Chickadee.

“ ‘I’ll build,’ said the Beaver. ‘I’ll build a house to live in with my wife and children, down beneath the frozen stream. Now may I get on with it? I’m very busy.’

“ ‘I’ll steal,’ the Raccoon with his burglar mask said. ‘Eggs from the People’s barns, garbage from their cans.’

“ ‘I’ll eat you,’ said the Red Fox. ‘See if I don’t!’ And he chased the poor Meadow Mouse and nearly caught him before the Meadow Mouse reached his private hole in the old Stone Fence.

“As he lay there panting, he could see that during his travels the great change called Winter had grown more evident in the Green Meadow. It was not so green now. It had grown brown and yellow and white. Many seeds had ripened and fallen or flown away on little wings. Overhead the Sun’s face was hidden by grim gray clouds. And still the Meadow Mouse had no plan to protect himself from cruel Brother North-wind.

“ ‘What will I do?’ he cried aloud. ‘Shall I go live with my cousin in Farmer Brown’s barn, and take my chances with Tom the cat and Fury the dog and the mousetraps and the poisons? I wouldn’t last long. Shall I start off to the South and hope I outrun Brother North-wind? Surely he’ll catch me unprotected and freeze me with his cold breath far from home. Shall I lie down with my wife and children and pull the grasses over my head and try to sleep? Before long I’d wake up hungry, and so would they. Whatever will I do?’

“Just then a glittering black eye looked in at him where he sat, so suddenly that he jumped up with a cry. It was the Black Crow.

“ ‘Meadow Mouse,’ he said, as gaily as ever, ‘whatever you do to protect yourself, there’s one thing you should know which you do not.’

“ ‘What is it?’ asked the Meadow Mouse.

“ ‘It’s Brother North-wind’s secret.’

“ ‘His secret! What is it? Do you know it? Will you tell it to me?’

“ ‘It is,’ the Black Crow answered, ‘the one good thing about Winter, which Brother North-wind wants no living creature to know. And yes, I know it; And no, I will not tell it to you.’ For the Black Crow guards his secrets as closely as he guards the shiny bits of metal and glass he finds and saves. And so the ungenerous creature went laughing off to join his brothers and sisters in the Old Pasture.

“The one good thing about Winter! What could it be? Not the cold or the snow or the ice or the flooding rains.

“Not the hiding and scavenging and deathlike sleep, and the running away from enemies desperate with hunger.

“Not the short days and long nights and pale, absentminded Sun, all of which the Meadow Mouse didn’t even know about yet.

“What could it be?

“That night, while the Meadow Mouse lay huddled for warmth with his wife and children in their house in the grass, Brother North-wind himself came sweeping across the Green Meadow. Oh, what great strides he took! Oh, how the brown, thin house of the Meadow Mouse rattled and shook! Oh, how the grim gray clouds were ripped and torn and flung from the face of the frightened Moon!

“ ‘Brother North-wind!’ the Meadow Mouse cried out. ‘I’m cold and frightened! Won’t you tell me the one good thing about Winter?’

“ ‘That’s my secret,’ Brother North-wind said in a great icy voice. And to show his strength he squeezed a tall maple tree till all its green leaves turned orange and red, and then he blew them all away. Which done, he strode away across the Green Meadow leaving the Meadow Mouse to tuck his cold nose into his paws and wonder what his secret was.

“Do you know what Brother North-wind’s secret is?

“Of course you do.”

“Oh. Oh.” Smoky came to himself. “I’m sorry, Terry, I didn’t mean to make you go on and on. Thank you very much.” He suppressed a yawn, and the children watched him do so with interest. “Um, now could everybody take out pens and paper and ink, please? Come on, no groaning. It’s too nice a day.”

The Only Game Going

Mornings it was reading and penmanship, the penmanship taking more time since Smoky taught them (could only teach them) his own Italic hand, which if done right is supremely lovely, and if done even a little wrong is illegible. “Ligature,” he would say sternly, tapping a paper, and its frowning maker would begin again. “Ligature,” he said to Patty Flowers, who through the whole of that year thought he was saying “Look at you,” an accusation she couldn’t reply to but couldn’t avoid; once in a fit of frustration at this she drove her pen-point through the paper, so fiercely it stuck in the desk like a knife.

Reading was a pickup affair with books from the Drinkwater library, Brother North-wind’s Secret and the rest of Doc’s tales for the younger and whatever Smoky thought appropriate and informative for the older. Sometimes, bored to tears with their halting voices, he simply read to them himself. He enjoyed that, and enjoyed explicating the hard parts and imagining aloud why the author had said what he had. Most of the kids thought these glosses were part of the text, and when they were grown, the few who read to themselves the books Smoky had read to them sometimes found them lean, allusive and tightlipped, as though parts were missing.

Afternoons was math, which often enough became an extension of penmanship, since the elegant shapes of Italic numbers interested Smoky as much as their relations. There were two or three of his students who were good at figures, perhaps prodigies Smoky thought because they were in fact quicker at fractions and other hard stuff than he was; he would get them to help teach the others. On the ancient principle that music and mathematics are sisters, he sometimes used the anyway somnolent and useless butt-end of the day to play to them on his violin; and its mild, not always certain songs, and the stove’s smell, and the winter foregathering outside, were what Billy Bush later remembered of arithmetic.

He had one great virtue as a teacher; he didn’t really understand children, didn’t enjoy their childishness, was baffled and shy before their mad energy. He treated them like grown-ups, because it was the only way he knew of treating anyone; when they didn’t respond like grown-ups, he ignored it and tried again. What he cared about was what he taught, the black ribbon of meaning that was writing, the bundles of words and the boxes of grammar it tied up, the notions of writers and the neat regularity of number. And so that was what he talked about. It was the only game going during school hours—even the cleverest kids found it hard to get him to play any other—and so when they had all stopped listening at last (it happened soonest on fine days, as when snow came tumbling hypnotically out of the sky or when sun and mud came together) he just let them go, unable to think of any way to amuse them further.

And went home himself then through the front gate of Edgewood (the schoolhouse was the old gatehouse, a gray Doric temple with ftr some reason a grand rack of antlers over the door) wondering whether Sophie had got up from her nap yet.

The One Good Thing About Winter

He lingered on this day to clean out the smaller stove; it would need lighting tomorrow, if the cold kept up. When he had locked the door he turned from the tiny temple and stood in the leaf-littered road that ran between it and the front gate of Edgewood. This road hadn’t been the one he had taken to reach Edgewood at first, nor this the gate he had gone in at. In fact no one ever used the front gate any more, and the sedge-drowned drive that led for half a mile through the Park was now only kept a path by his diurnal journeys, as though it were the habitual trail of a large and heavyfooted wild beast.

The tall entrance gates before him, green wrought-iron in a ’90’s lily pattern, stood or leaned eternally open, lashed to earth by weed and undergrowth. Only a rusted chain across the drive now suggested that this was still the entrance to somewhere, and not to be entered upon by the uninvited. To his left and his right the road ran away down an avenue of horse-chestnuts heartbreakingly golden; the wind tore fortunes from them and scattered them spendthrift. The road wasn’t used much either, except by the kids walking or biking from here and there to school, and Smoky wasn’t sure exactly where it led. But he thought that day, standing ankle-deep in leaves and for some reason unable to pass through the gates, that one branch of it must lead to the cracked macadam from Meadowbrook, which joined the tarred road that went past the Junipers’, which eventually joined the traffic-loud fugue of feeder roads and expressways roaring into the City.

What if he were now to turn right (left?) and start off back that way, empty-handed and on foot as he had come, going backwards as in a film run the wrong way (leaves leaping to the trees) until he was where he had started from?

Well, for one thing he was not empty-handed.

And he had grown increasingly certain (not because it was sensible or even possible) that once on a summer afternoon having entered through the screen door into Edgewood, he had never again left: that the various doors by which he had afterwards seemed to go out had led only to further parts of the house, cleverly by some architectural enfoldment or trompe-l’oeil (which he didn’t doubt John Drinkwater was capable of) made to look and behave like woods, lakes, farms, and distant hills. The road taken might lead only back around to some other porch at Edgewood, one he had never seen before, with wide worn steps and a door for him to go in by.

He uprooted himself from the spot, and from these autumnal notions. The circularity of roads and seasons: he had been here before. October was the cause.

Yet he stopped again as he crossed the stained white bridge that arched the sheet of water (stucco had been broken here, showing the plain brickwork beneath, that should be fixed, winter was the cause). Down in the water, drowned leaves turned and flew in the current, as the same leaves turned and flew in the busy sea of air, only half as fast or slower; sharp orange claws of maple, broad blades of elm and hickory, torn oak inelegant brown. In the air they were too fast to follow, but down in the mirror-box of the stream they did their dance with elegiac slowness for the current’s sake.

What on earth was he to do?

When long ago he had seen that he would grow a character in the place of his lost anonymity, he had supposed that it would be like a suit of clothes bought too large fur a child, that the child must grow into. He expected a certain discomfort at first, an illfittingness, that would go away as his self filled up the spaces, took the shape of his character, until at last it would be creased for good in the places where he bent and worn smooth where it chafed him. He expected, that is, for it to be singular. He didn’t expect to have to suffer more than one; or, worse, to find himself done up in the wrong one at the wrong time, or in parts of several all at once, bound and struggling.

He looked toward the inscrutable edge of Edgewood which pointed toward him, windows lit already in the fleeting day; a mask that covered many faces, or a single face that wore many masks, he didn’t know which, nor did he know it about himself.

What was the one good thing about Winter? Well, he knew the answer to that; he’d read the book before. If Winter comes, Spring can’t be far behind. But oh yes, he thought; yes it can; far behind.

The Old Age of the World

In the polygonal music room on the ground floor Daily Alice, hugely pregnant for the second time, played checkers with Great-Aunt Cloud.

“It’s as though,” Daily Alice said, “each day is like a step, and every step takes you further away from—well, from when things made more sense. When things were all alive, and made signs to you. And you can no more not take a step farther away than you could not live through a day.”

“I think I see,” Cloud said. “But I think it only seems so.”

“It isn’t just that I’ve outgrown it.” She was stacking up her captured red men in even piles. “Don’t tell me that.”

“It’ll always be easier for children. You’re an old lady now—children of your own.”

“And Violet? What about Violet?”

“Oh, yes. Well. Violet.”

“What I wonder is, maybe the world is growing older. Less all alive. Or is it only my growing older?”

“Everybody always wonders that. I don’t think, really, anyone could feel the world grow older. Its life is far too long for that.” She took a black man of Alice’s. “What maybe you learn as you grow older is that the world is old—very old. When you’re young, the world seems young. That’s all.”

That made sense, Daily Alice thought, and yet it couldn’t explain the sense of loss she felt, a sense that things clear to her were being left behind, connections broken around her, by her, daily. When she was young, she had always the sense that she was being teased: teased to go on, ahead, follow somewhere. That was what she had lost. She felt certain that never again would she spy, with that special flush of sensibility, a clue to their presence, a message meant only for her; wouldn’t feel again, when she slept in the sun, the brush of garments against her cheek, the garments of those who observed her, who, when she woke, had fled, and left only the leaves astir around her.

Come hither, come hither, they had sung in her childhood. Now she was stationary.

“Your move,” Cloud said.

“Well, do you do that consciously?” Daily Alice asked, only partly of Cloud.

“Do what?” Cloud said. “Grow up? No. Well. In a sense. You see it’s inevitable, or refuse to. You greet it or don’t—take it in trade, maybe, for all you’re going to lose anyway. Or you can refuse, and have what you’ve got to lose snatched from you, and never take payment—never see a trade is possible.” She thought of Auberon.

Through the windows of the music room, Daily Alice saw Smoky trudging home, his image refracted jerkily as it passed from one old rippled pane into the next. Yes: if what Cloud said were true, then she had taken Smoky in trade—and what she had traded for him was the living sense that it was they, they themselves, who had led her to him, they who had chosen him for her, they who had plotted the quick glances that had made him hers, the long engagement, the fruitful and snug marriage. So that though she possessed what she had been promised, she had lost in return the sense that it had been promised. Which made what she possessed—Smoky, and ordinary happiness—seem fragile, losable, hers only by chance.

Afraid: she felt afraid: yet how could it be, if the bargain had been truly struck, and she had done her part, and it had cost her so much, and they had gone to such trouble to prepare it all, that she could lose him? Could they be that deceitful? Did she understand so little? And yet she was afraid.

She heard the front door close, solemnly, and a moment later she saw Doc in a red plaid jacket come out toward Smoky, carrying two shotguns and other equipment. Smoky looked surprised, then shot up his eyes and smacked his forehead as though remembering something he’d forgotten. Then, resigned, he took one of the guns from Doc, who was pointing out possible ways they might take; the wind blew orange sparks from his pipe-bowl. Smoky turned away with him outward toward the Park, Doc still pointing and talking. Once, Smoky looked back, toward the upstairs windows of the house.

“Your move,” Cloud said again.

Alice looked down at the board, which had grown disjunct and patternless. Sophie came through the music-room then, in a flannel gown and a cardigan of Alice’s, and for a moment the two women stopped their game. It wasn’t that Sophie distracted them; she seemed oblivious of them; she noticed them, but took no notice. It was that as she passed they both seemed to feel the world intensely around them for a moment: the wind, wild, and the earth, brown, outside; the hour, late afternoon; the day and the house’s progress through it. Whether it was this sudden generality of feeling which Sophie caused, or Sophie herself, Daily Alice didn’t know; but something just then became clear to her which had not been clear before.

“Where’s he going?” Sophie said to no one, splaying a hand against the curved glass of the bay as though it were a barrier or the bars of a cage she had just found herself to be in.

“Hunting,” Daily Alice said. She made a king, and said “Your move.”

Unflinching Predators

It was only once or so an autumn that Doctor Drinkwater unlimbered one of a number of shotguns his grandfather had kept in a case in the billiard room, cleaned it, loaded it, and went out to shoot birds. For all his love of the animal world—or perhaps because of it—Doc felt he deserved as much as the Red Fox or the Barn Owl to be a carnivore, if it was in his nature to be so; and the unaffected joy with which he ate flesh, chewing the bones and gristle and licking with delight the grease from his fingers, convinced him it was in his nature. He thought however that he ought, if he was to be a carnivore, to be able to face killing what he ate rather than that the bloody work should always be done elsewhere and he enjoy only the trimmed and unrecognizable products. One shoot or two a year, a few bright-plumaged birds blasted mercilessly from the sky, and brought home bleeding and open-beaked, seemed to satisfy his scruples; his woodcraft and stealth made up for a certain irresolution at the moment the grouse or pheasant thundered from the brush, and he usually managed to supply a good harvest-home, and thus to think of himself as an unflinching predator when he tucked into the beef and lamb the rest of the year.

Often these days he took Smoky along, having convinced him of the logic of this position. Doc was left-handed and Smoky right-handed, which made it less likely that they’d shoot each other in their blood-lust, and Smoky, though inattentive and not very patient, turned out to be a natural shot.

“We’re still,” Smoky asked as they crossed a stone fence, “on your property?”

“Drinkwater property,” Doc said. “Do you know, this lichen here, the flat, silvery kind, can live to be hundreds of years old?”

“Yours, Drinkwater’s,” Smoky said, “is what I meant.”

“Actually, you know,” Doc said, cradling his weapon and choosing a direction, “I’m not a Drinkwater. Not by name.” It reminded Smoky of the first words Doc had ever said to him: “Not a practicing doctor,” he’d said.

“Technically I’m a bastard.” He tugged his checked cap further over his forehead and considered his case without rancor. “I was illegitimate, and never legally adopted by anybody. Violet raised me, mostly, and Nora and Harvey Cloud. But never got around to going through the formalities.”

“Oh?” said Smoky, with a show of interest, though in fact he knew the story.

“Skeletons,” Doc said, “in the old family wardrobe. My father had a what, a liaison, with Amy Meadows, you met her.”

He plowed her, and she cropp’d, Smoky quoted, almost, unforgivably, aloud. “Yes,” he said. “Amy Woods now.”

“Married to Chris Woods now many years.”

“Mmm.” What memory tried to enter Smoky’s consciousness, but at the last moment changed its mind, and withdrew? A dream?

“I was the result.” His Adam’s apple moved, whether from emotion or not Smoky couldn’t tell. “I think if you sort of spread out around that brake there, we’re coming to some good spots.”

Smoky went where he was told. He held his gun, an old English over-and-under, at the ready, the chased safety off. He didn’t, like the rest of the family, much enjoy long aimless walks outdoors, especially in the wet; but if they had a token purpose, like today’s, he could go on in discomfort with the best of them. He would like though to pull a trigger at least, even if he hit nothing. And even as he was dwelling absently on this, two brown cannonballs were fired from the tangled thicket ahead of him, pounding the air for altitude. Smoky gave a startled cry, but was raising his gun even as Doc shouted “Yours!”, and as though his barrels were tied by strings to their tails, followed one, fired, followed the other and fired again; lowered his gun to watch, astonished, both birds tumble through the air and fall to earth with a crackle of brown weed and a definitive thump. “Damn,” he said.

“Good shot,” Doc cried out heartily, with only a small pang of guilty horror in his heart.

Responsibilities

Coming back in a wide circle toward the house, with a bag of four and the evening growing cold as winter, they passed a thing that had puzzled Smoky before: he was used to seeing the ruins of half-started projects around the place, greenhouses, temples, forlorn yet Somehow appropriate, but what was an old car doing rusting away to unrecognizability in the middle of a field? A very old car too: it must have been there fifty years, its half-buried spoked wheels as lonesome and antique as the broken wheels of prairie schooners sunken on Midwestern prairies.

“A Model T, yes,” Doc said. “My father’s once.”

With it in view, they stopped at a stone wall to pass back and forth, as hunters will, a warming flask.

“As I grew up,” Doc said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, “I started to ask how I had come about. Well, I did get it out of them about Amy and August, but you see Amy has always wanted to pretend it all never happened, that she’s just an old friend of the family, even though everybody was well aware, even Chris Woods, and even though she used to cry whenever I went to visit her. Violet—well. She seemed to have forgotten August altogether, though you never knew with her. Nora only said: he ran off.” He passed the flask back. “I eventually got up the courage to ask Amy what the story had been, and she got, well, shy and—girlish is the only way to put it. August was her first love. Some people never forget, do they? I’m proud of that, in a way.”

“Used to be thought a love-child was special,” Smoky threw in. “Very good or very bad. Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. Edmund in…”

“I was at the age when you want to be sure of all this,” Doc went on. “Just who you are, exactly. Your identity. You know.” Smoky in fact didn’t. “I thought: My father ran off, without leaving, so far as I knew, a trace. Mightn’t I do the same? Mightn’t it be in my nature too? And perhaps if I found him, after who knows what adventures, I would make him acknowledge me. Grasp his shoulders in my hands—” here Doc made a gesture which the flask in his hand kept from being as poignant as it ought to have been “—and say I am your son.” He sat back, and drank moodily.

“And did you run off?”

“I did. Sort of.”

“And?”

“Oh, I didn’t get far, really. And there was always money from home. I got a doctor’s degree, even though I’ve never practiced much; saw something of the Great World. But I came back.” He smiled shyly. “I suppose they knew I would. Sophie Dale knew I would. So she says now.”

“Never did find your father,” Smoky said.

“Well,” Doc said, “yes and no.” He contemplated the pile in the field. Soon it would be only a shapeless hillock where no grass grew; then nothing. “I suppose it’s true, you know, that you set out on adventures and then find what you’ve been looking for right in your own backyard.”

Below and beside them, unmoving in his secret place in the stone wall, a Meadow Mouse observed them. What were they about? He smelled the reek of their slaughter, and their mouths moved as though consuming vast provender, but they weren’t eating. He squatted on the coarse pad of lichen he and his ancestors had squatted on for time out of mind and wondered: wondering made his nose twitch furiously and his translucent ears cup themselves toward the sounds they made.

“It doesn’t do to inquire into some things too deeply,” Doc said. “Into what’s given. What can’t be changed.”

“No,” Smoky said, with less conviction.

“We,” Doc said, and Smoky thought he knew whom of them that “we” included and whom of them it didn’t, “have our responsibilities. It wouldn’t do just to run off on some quest and pay no attention to what others might want or need. We have to think of them.”

The Meadow Mouse in the midst of his wonderings had fallen asleep, but awoke with a start as the two great creatures stood and collected their inexplicable belongings.

“Sometimes we don’t entirely understand,” Doc said, as though it were wisdom he had arrived at after some cost. “But we have our parts to play.”

Smoky drank, and capped the flask. Could it really be that he intended to abdicate his responsibilities, throw up his part, do something so horrid and unlike himself, and so hopeless too? What you’re looking for is right in your own backyard: a grim joke, in his case. Well, he couldn’t tell; and knew no one he could ask; but he knew he was tired of struggling.

And anyway, he thought, it wouldn’t be the first time it ever happened in the world.

Harvest-Home

The day of the game supper, when the birds had hung, was something of an occasion every year. Through that week, people would arrive, and be closeted with Great-aunt Cloud, and pay their rents or explain why they couldn’t (Smoky wasn’t amazed, having no sense of real property and its values, at the great extent of the Drinkwater property or the odd way in which it was managed— though this yearly ceremony did seem very feudal to him). Most of those who came brought some tribute too, a gallon of cider, a basket of white-rayed apples, tomatoes in purple paper.

The Floods and Hannah and Sonny Noon, the largest (in every way) of their tenants, stayed to the supper. Rudy brought a duck of his own to fill out the feast, and the lavender-smelling lace tablecloth was laid. Cloud opened her polished box of wedding-silver (she being the only Drinkwater bride anyone had ever thought to give such to, the Clouds had been careful about these things) and the tall candles shone on it and on the facets of cut-crystal glasses, diminished this year by one small heartrending crash.

They set out a lot of sleepy, sea-dark wine that Walter Ocean made every year and decanted the next, his tribute; in it, toasts were made over the glistening bodies of the birds and the bowls of autumn harvest. Rudy rose, his stomach advancing somewhat over the table’s edge, and said:

Which that year included his own grandson Robin, and Sonny Noon’s new twins, and Smoky’s daughter Tacey.

Mother said, glass aloft:

Smoky began one in Latin, but Daily Alice and Sophie groaned, so he stopped, and began again:

“ ‘Abating shadows’ is good,” said Doc. “And ‘conscript dust’.”

“Didn’t know you were a smoker though,” Rudy said.

“And I didn’t know, Rudy,” Smoky said expansively, inhaling Rudy’s Old Spice, “you were a lavish heart.” He helped himself to the decanter.

“I’ll say one I learned as a kid,” said Hannah Noon, “and then let’s get down to it:

Seized by the Tale

After dinner, Rudy sorted through some piles of ancient records as heavy as dishes that had lain long disused and circled with arcs of dust in the buffet. He found treasures, greeting old friends with glad cries. They stacked them on the record player and danced.

Daily Alice, unable after the first round to dance any more, rested her hands on the great prie-dieu of stomach she had grown and watched the others. Great Rudy flung his little wife around like a jointed doll, and Alice supposed he’d learned over the years how to live with her and not break her; she imagined his great weight on her—no, probably she would climb up on him, like climbing a mountain.

Smoky, bright-eyed and loose-limbed, made her laugh with his cheerfulness, like a sun; a sunny disposition, is that what was meant by that? And how did he come to know the words to these :razy songs, who seemed never to know anything that everybody else knew? He danced with Sophie, just tall enough to take her properly, footing it gallantly and inexpertly.

Like a sun: but a small sun, which she had within her, warming her from the inside out. She was conscious of a feeling she had had before, a sense that she was looking at him, and at all of them, from some way off, or from a great height. There had been a time when she seemed to herself to be snug, and small, within the large house of Smoky, a safe inhabitant, room to run in yet never leave his encompassment. Now she oftener felt otherwise: over time it was he who seemed to have become a mouse within the house of her. Huge: that’s what she felt herself to be becoming. Her perimeters expanded, she felt that eventually she would be contiguous almost with the walls of Edgewood itself: as large, as old, as comfortably splayed on its feet and as capacious. And as she grew huge—this suddenly struck her—the ones she loved diminished in size as surely as if they walked away from her, and left her behind.

“Ain’t misbehavin’,” Smoky sang in a dreamy, effete falsetto, “savin’ all my love for you.”

Mysteries seemed to accumulate around her. She rose heavily, saying No, no, you stay, to Smoky who had come to her, and went laboriously up the stairs, as though she carried a great, fragile egg before her, which she did, almost hatched. She thought perhaps she had better get advice, before winter came and it was no longer possible.

But when she sat on the edge of her bed, still faintly hearing the high accents of the music below, which seemed to be endlessly repeating tin-cup, top-hat, she saw that she knew what advice she would get if she went to get it: it would only be made clear to her again what she already knew, what only grew dim or clouded now and again by daily life, by useless hopes and by despairs equally useless—that if this were indeed a Tale, and she in it, then no gesture she or any of them could make was not a part of it, no rising up to dance or sitting down to eat and drink, no blessing or curse, no joy, no longing, no error; if they fled the Tale or struggled against it, well, that too was part of the Tale. They had chosen Smoky for her and then she had chosen him for herself; or, she had chosen him and then they had chosen him for her; either way it was the Tale. And if in some subtle way he moved on or away and she lost him now, by inches, by small daily motions she only now and then even perceived for certain, then his loss to her, and the degree of that loss, and each one of the myriad motions, looks, lookings-away, absences, angers, placations and desires that made up Loss, sealing him from her as layers of lacquer seal the painted bird on a japanned tray or as layers of rain freeze deeper the fallen leaf within the winter pond, all of it was the Tale. And if there were to come some new turning, some debouchment of this shaded lane they seemed just now to be walking, if it opened up quite suddenly into broad, flower-starred fields, or even if it only brought them to crossroads where fingerboards stated cautiously the possibilities of such fields, then all that too would be the Tale; and those whom Daily Alice thought wise, whom she supposed to be endlessly relating this tale. Somehow at the same pace as Drinkwater and Barnable lives fell away day by day, hour by hour—those tellers couldn’t be blamed for anything told of in it, because in fact they neither spun nor told it really, but only knew how it would unfold in some way she never would; and that should satisfy her.

“No,” she said aloud. “I don’t believe it. They have powers. It’s just that sometimes we don’t understand how they’ll protect us. And if you know, you won’t say.”

“That’s right,” Grandfather Trout seemed gloomily to reply. “Contradict your elders, think you know better.”

She lay back on her bed, supporting her child with interlaced fingers, thinking she did not know better, hut that advice would anyway be lost on her. “I’ll hope,” she said. “I’ll be happy. There’s something I don’t know, some gift they have to give. At the right time it’ll be there. At the last moment. That’s how Tales are,” and she wouldn’t listen to the sardonic answer she knew the fish would give to this; and yet when Smoky opened the door and came in whistling, his odor a meld of the wine he had drunk and Sophie’s perfume he had absorbed, something which had been growing within her, a wave, crested, and she began to weep.

The tears of those who never cry, the calm, the levelheaded ones, are terrible to see. She seemed to be split or torn by the force of the tears, which she squeezed her eyes shut against, which she forced back with her fist against her lips. Smoky, afraid and awed, came immediately to her as he might to rescue his child from a fire, without thought and without knowing quite what he would do. When he tried to take her hand, speak softly to her, she only trembled more violently, the red cross branded on her face grew uglier; so he enveloped her, smother the flames. Disregarding her resistance, as well as he could he covered her, having a vague idea that he could by tenderness invade her and then rout her grief, whatever it was, by main strength. He wasn’t sure he wasn’t himself the cause of it, wasn’t sure if she would cling to him for comfort or break him in rage, but he had no choice anyway, savior or sacrifice, it didn’t matter so long as she could cease suffering.

She yielded, not at first willing to, and took handfuls of his shirt as though she meant to rend his garments, and “Tell me,” he said, “tell me,” as though that could make it right; but he could no more keep her from suffering this than he would be able to keep her from sweating and crying aloud when the child within her made its way out. And there was no way anyway for her to tell him that what made her weep was a picture in her mind of the black pool in the forest, starred with golden leaves falling continuously, each hovering momentarily above the surface of the water before it alighted, as though choosing carefully its drowning place, and the great damned fish within too cold to speak or think: that fish seized by the Tale, even as she was herself.

It’s George Mouse,” Smoky said. Lily clinging to his pants-leg looked out the front way where her father pointed. Above the fist stuck in her face, her longlashed eyes made no judgment on George coming up through the mist, his boots spraying puddles. He wore his great black cloak, his Svengali’s hat limp with rain; he waved a hand at them as he came up. “Hey,” he said, squishily mounting the stairs. “Heeeeeey.” He embraced Smoky; beneath his hat-brim his teeth shone and his dark-rimmed eyes were coals. “This is what’s-her-name, Tacey?”

“Lily,” Smoky said. Lily retreated behind the curtain of her father’s pants. “Tacey’s a big girl now. Six years old.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yes.”

“Time flies.”

“Well, come in. What’s up? You should have written.”

“Didn’t decide till this morning.”

“Any reason?”

Time Flies

“Wild hair up my ass.” He chose not to tell Smoky of the five hundred milligrams of Pellucidar he had taken and which were now coldly ventilating his nervous system like the first day of winter, which this was, seventh winter solstice of Smoky’s married life. The great capsule of Pellucidar had put him on the gad; he had got out the Mercedes, one of the last tangibles of the old Mouse affluence, and driven north till all the gas stations he passed were bankrupt ones; he parked it then in the garage of a deserted house, and, breathing deeply of the dense and moldy air, set off on foot.

The front door closed behind them with a solid sound of brass fittings and a rattle of the oval glass. George Mouse decaped grandly, a gesture that made Lily laugh and that halted Tacey in her headlong rush down the hail to see who had come. Behind her came Daily Alice in a long cardigan, her fists making bulges in the pockets. She ran to kiss George, and he pressing her felt a dizzying and inappropriate rush of chemical lust that made him laugh.

They all turned toward the parlor where yellow lamplight already shone, and saw themselves in the tall hall pier-glass. George stopped them by it, holding a shoulder of each, and studied the images: himself, his cousin, Smoky—and Lily who just then appeared between her mother’s legs. Changed? Well, Smoky had regrown the beard he had started and then amputated when George first knew him. His face looked gaunter, more what George could only call (since the word was just then rushed to him by importunate messenger) more spiritual. SPIRITUAL. Watch out. He got a grip on himself. Alice: a mother twice over, amazing! It occurred to him that seeing a woman’s child is like seeing a woman naked, in the way it changes how her face looks to you, how her face becomes less the whole story. And himself? He could see the grizzle in his moustache, the lean stoop of his stringbean torso, but that was nothing; it was the same face that had always looked out from mirrors at him since he had first looked in.

“Time flies,” he said.

A Definite Hazard

In the parlor, they were all preparing a long shopping list. “Peanut butter,” Mother said, “stamps, iodine, soda-water—lots of it, soap pads, raisins, tooth powder; chutney, chewing gum, candles, George!” She embraced him; Doctor Drinkwater looked up from the list he was making.

“Hello, George,” said Cloud from her corner by the fire. “Don’t forget cigarettes.”

“Paper diapers, the cheap ones,” Daily Alice said. “Matches—Tampax—3-in-One Oil.”

“Oatmeal,” Mother said. “How are your people, George?”

“No oatmeal!” Tacey said.

“Good, good. Mom’s, you know, hanging on.” Mother shook her head. “I haven’t seen Franz for, oh, a year?” He put bills on the drum-table where Doc wrote. “A bottle of gin,” he said.

Doc wrote “gin,” but pushed aside the bills. “Aspirin,” he remembered. “Camphorated oil. Antihistamine.”

“Somebody sick?” George asked.

“Sophie’s got this strange fever,” Daily Alice said. “It comes and goes.”

“Last call,” Doc said, looking up at his wife. She stroked her chin and clucked in an agony of doubt, and at last decided she would have to go too. In the hall, pursued by all of their last-minute needs, he tugged a cap over his head (his hair had gone almost white, like dirty cotton-wool) and put on a pair of pink-framed glasses his license said he had to wear. He picked up a brown envelope of papers he must deal with, announced himself ready, and they all went out onto the porch to see them off.

“I hope they’ll be careful,” Cloud said. “It’s very wet.”

From within the coach-house, they heard a hesitant grinding. Then an expectant silence, followed by a firmer start, and the station wagon backed warily out into the drive, making two soft and delible marks in the wet leaves. George Mouse marveled. Here they all were intently watching nothing more than an old guy very gingerly handling a car. The gears ground and an awed silence fell. George knew of course that it wasn’t every day they got the car out, that it was an occasion, that doubtless Doc had spent the morning wiping cobwebs from the old wood sides and chasing chipmunks away who were thinking of nesting under the apparently immobile seats, and that he now put on the old machine like a suit of armor to go out and do battle in the Great World. Had to hand it to his country cousins. Everybody he knew in the City hitched endlessly about the Car and its depredations; his cousins had never handled this twenty-year-old woodie anyhow but infrequently and with the greatest respect. He laughed, waving goodbye with the rest, imagining Doc out on the road, nervous at first, shushing his wife, changing gears with care; then turning onto the great highway, beginning to enjoy the smooth slipping-by of brown landscape and the sureness of his control, until some monster truck roars by and nearly blows him off the road. The guy’s a definite hazard.

Up on the Hill

He certainly didn’t want, George said, to stay indoors; he’d come up for fresh air and stuff, even if he hadn’t picked the best day for it; so Smoky put on a hat and galoshes, took a stick, and went with him to walk up the Hill.

Drinkwater had tamed the Hill with a footpath, and stone steps where it was steepest, and rustic seats at lookout places, and a stone table at the top where views and lunch could be taken together. “No lunch,” George said. The fine rain had stopped—had halted, it seemed, in mid-fall, and hung, stationary, in the air. They went up the path which circled the tops of trees that grew in the ravines below, George admiring the pattern of silver drops on leaf and twig and Smoky pointing out the odd bird (he had learned the names of many, particularly odd ones).

“No but really,” George said. “How’s it going?”

“Slate junco,” Smoky said. “Good. Good.” He sighed. “It’s just hard when winter comes.”

“God, yes.”

“No, but harder here. I don’t know. I wouldn’t have it any different… You just can’t bear the melancholy, some evenings.” Indeed it seemed to George that Smoky’s eyes might brim with tears. George breathed deeply, glorying in the wetness and the wood. “Yes, it’s bad,” he said happily.

“You’re indoors so much,” Smoky said. “You draw together. And there’s so many people there. You seem to get wound around each other more.”

“In that house? You could lose yourself for days in there. For days.” He remembered an afternoon like this one when he was a kid, when he had come up here for Christmas with the family. While searching for the stash he knew must be somewhere awaiting the great morning, he got lost on the third floor. He went down a strange staircase narrow as a chute, found himself Elsewhere amid strange rooms; draughts made a dusty tapestry in a sitting room breathe with spooky life, his own feet sounded like other’s feet coming toward him. He began to shout after a while, having lost the staircase; found another; lost all restraint when he heard far off Mom Drinkwater calling to him, and ran around shouting and throwing open doors until at last he opened the arched door of what looked like a church, where his two cousins were taking a bath.

They sat on one of Drinkwater’s seats of bent and knobby wood. Through the screen of naked trees they could see across the land a great gray distance. They could just make out the gray back of the Interstate lying coiled and smooth in the next county; they could even hear, at moments, carried on the thick air, the far hum of trucks: the monster breathed. Smoky pointed out a finger or Hydra’s head of it which reached out tentatively through the hills this way, then stopped abruptly. Those bits of yellow, sole brightness on the scene, were sleeping caterpillars—the man-made kind, earth-movers and -shakers. They wouldn’t come any closer; the surveyors and purveyors, contractors and engineers were stalled there, mired, bogged in indecision, and that vestigial limb would never grow bone and muscle to punch through the pentacle of five towns around Edgewood. Smoky knew it. “Don’t ask me how,” he said.

But George Mouse had been thinking of a scheme whereby all the buildings, mostly empty, on the block his family owned in the City might be combined and sealed up to make an enormous, impenetrable curtain-wall—like the hollow wall of a castle—around the center of the block, where the gardens were. The outbuildings and stuff inside the block could be torn down then and all the garden-space transformed into a single pasture or farm. They could grow things there, and keep cows. No, goats. Goats were smaller and less fussy about their food. They gave milk and there would be the odd kid to eat. George had never killed anything larger than a cockroach, but he had eaten kid in a ’Rican diner and his mouth watered. He hadn’t heard what Smoky said, though he had heard Smoky talking. He said, “But what’s the story? What’s the real story?”

“Well, we’re Protected, you know,” Smoky said vaguely, digging the black ground with his stick. “But there’s always something that’s got to be given in return fur protection, isn’t there?” He hadn’t understood any of that in the beginning; he didn’t suppose he understood it any better now. Though he knew some payment had to be made, he wasn’t sure whether it had been made, or was to be made, or had been deferred; whether the vague sense he had in winter of something being wrung from him, of being dunned and desiccated and having sacrificed much (he couldn’t say what exactly) meant that the Creditors had been satisfied, or that the goblins he sensed peeking in the windows and calling down the chimneys, clustering under the eaves and scrabbling through the disused upper rooms were reminding him and all of them of a debt unpaid, tribute unexacted, goblin principal earning some horrid interest he couldn’t calculate.

But George had been thinking of a plan to represent the basic notions of Act Theory (that he had read of in a popular magazine and which seemed to him just then to make sense, a lot of sense) by means of a display of fireworks: how the various parts of an Act as the theory explained them could be expressed in the initiation, rising whistle, culminating starburst and crackling expiration of a colored bomb; and how in combination fireworks could represent “entrained” Acts, multiple Acts of all kinds, the grand Act that is Life’s rhythm and Time’s. The notion faded in sparks. He shook Smoky’s shoulder and said, “But how goes it? How are you getting on?”

“Jesus, George,” Smoky said standing. “I’ve told you all I can. I’m freezing. I bet it freezes over tonight. There might be snow for Christmas.” He knew in fact there would be; it had been promised. “Let’s go get some cocoa.”

Cocoa and a Bun

It was brown and hot, with chocolate bubbles winking at the brim. A marshmallow Cloud had plopped in it turned and bubbled as though dissolving in joy. Daily Alice instructed Tacey and Lily in the arts of blowing gently on it, picking it up by the handle, and laughing at the brown moustaches it made. The way Cloud watched over it it grew no skin, though George didn’t mind a skin; his mother’s had always had a skin, and so had that they served from urns in the basement of the Church of All Streets, a nondenominational church she had used to take him and Franz to, always, it seemed, on days like this.

“Have another bun,” Cloud said to Alice. “Eating for two,” she said to George.

“You don’t mean it,” George said.

“I think so,” Alice said. She bit the bun. “I’m a good bearer.”

“Wow. A boy this time.”

“No,” she said confidently. “Another girl. So Cloud says.

“Not I,” Cloud said. “The cards.”

“We’ll name her Lucy,” Tacey said. “Lucy Ann and Anndy Ann de Barn Barn Barnable. George has two moustaches.”

“Who’ll take this up to Sophie?” Cloud said, setting a cup and a bun on a black japanned tray of great age that showed a silver-haired, star-spangled sprite drinking Coke.

“Let me,” George said. “Hey, Aunt Cloud. Can you do the cards for me?”

“Sure, George. I think you’re included.”

“Now if I can find her room,” he said giggling. He took up the tray carefully, noting that his hands had begun to shake.

Sophie was asleep when he came into her room by pushing the door open with his knee. He stood unmoving in the room, feeling the steam rise from the cocoa and hoping she would never wake. So strange to feel again those adolescent peeping-tom emotions—mostly a trembling weakness at the knees and a dry thickness in the throat—caused now by conjunction of the mad capsule and Sophie deshabille on the messy bed. One long leg was uncovered and the toes pointed toward the floor, as though indicating the appropriate one of two Chinese slippers that peeped from beneath a discarded kimono; her breasts soft with sleeping had come out of her ruffled ’jammies and rose and fell slightly with her breathing, flushed (he thought tenderly) with fever. Even as he devoured her though she seemed to feel his gaze, and without waking she pulled her clothes together and rolled over so her cheek lay on her closed fist. It made him want to laugh, or cry, so prettily she did it, but he restrained himself and did neither, only set down the tray on her table cluttered with pill bottles and crushed tissues. He moved onto the bed a big album or scrapbook to do it, and at that she woke.

“George,” she said calmly, stretching, not surprised, thinking perhaps she was still asleep. He laid his swarthy hand to her brow gently. “Hi, cutie,” he said. She lay back amid the pillows; her eyes closed, and for a moment she wandered back to dreamland. Then she said Oh arid struggled up to kneel on the bed and come full awake. “George!”

“Feeling better?”

“I don’t know. I was dreaming. Cocoa for me?”

“For you. What were you dreaming?”

“Mm. Good. Sleeping makes me hungry. Does it you?” She wiped away her moustache with a pink tissue she plucked from a box of them; another took its place pertly. “Oh, dreams about years ago. I guess because of that album. No you can’t.” She took his hand from it. “Dirty pictures.”

“Dirty.”

“Pictures of me, years ago.” She smiled, ducking her head Drinkwater-style, and peeked at him over her cocoa cup with eyes still crinkled with sleep. “What are you doing here?”

“Came to see you,” George said; once he had seen her, he knew it to be true. She didn’t respond to his gallantry; she seemed to have forgotten him, or remembered suddenly something else entirely; the cocoa cup stopped halfway to her lips. She put it down slowly, her eyes looking at something he couldn’t see, something within. Then she seemed to wrest herself from it, laughed a quick, frightened laugh and took George’s wrist in a sudden grip as though to stay herself. “Some dreams,” she said, searching his face. “It’s the fever.”

The Orphan Nymphs

She had always lived her best life in dreams. She knew no greater pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind her lids became ordered and doors opened; when conscious thought grew owl’s wings and talons and became other than conscious.

Starting from the simple pleasure of it, she had become practiced in all its nameless arts. The first thing was to learn to hear the small voice: that fragment of conscious self which like a guardian angel walks with the eidolons of self with which we replace ourselves in Dreamland, the voice that whispers you are dreaming. The trick was to hear it, but not attend to it, or else you wake. She learned to hear it; and it told her that she could not be hurt by dream wounds, no matter how terrible; she woke from them always whole and safe—most safe because warm in bed. Since then she had feared no bad dreams; the dream Dante of her leaned on the dreaming Virgil and passed through horrors delightful and instructive.

Next she found she was one of those who can awake, leap the gap of consciousness, and arrive back in the same dream she had awakened from. She could build also many-storied houses of dream; she could dream that she woke, and then dream that she woke from that dream, each time dreaming that she said Oh! It was all a dream! until at last and most wonderful she woke to wakefulness, home from her journey, and breakfast cooking downstairs.

But soon she began to linger on her journeys, go farther, return later and more reluctantly. She worried, at first, that if she spent half the day as well as all the night in Dreamland, she would eventually run out of matter to transmute into dreams, that her dreams would grow thin, unconvincing, repetitious. The opposite happened. The deeper she journeyed—the farther the waking world fell behind—the grander and more inventive became the fictive landscapes, the more complete and epical the adventures. How could that be? Where if not from waking life, books and pictures, loves and longings, real roads and rocks and real toes stubbed on them, could she manufacture dreams? And where then did these fabulous isles, gloomy vast sheds, intricate cities, cruel governments, insoluble problems, comical supporting players with convincing manners, come from? She didn’t know; gradually she came not to care.

She knew that the real ones, loved ones, in her life worried about her. Their concern followed her into dreams, but became transformed into exquisite persecutions and triumphal reunions, so that was how she chose to deal with them and their concern.

And now she had learned the last art, which squared the power of her secret life and at the same time hushed the real ones’ questions. She had Somehow learned to raise at will a fever, and with it the lurid, compelling, white-hot dreams a fever brings. Flushed with the victory of it, she hadn’t at first seen the danger of this double dose, as it were; too hastily she tossed away most of her waking life—it had lately grown complex and promiseiess any- how—and retired to her sickbed secretly, guiltily exulting.

Only on waking was she sometimes—as now when George Mouse saw her look within—seized by the terrible understanding of the addict: the understanding that she was doomed, had lost her way in this realm, had, not meaning to, gone too far in to find a way out—that the only way out was to go in, give in, fly further in—that the only way to ameliorate the horror of her addiction was to indulge it.

She grasped George’s wrist as though his real flesh could wake her truly. “Some dreams,” she said. “It’s the fever.”

“Sure,” George said. “Fever dreams.”

“I ache,” she said, hugging herself. “Too much sleep. Too long in one position. Something.”

“You need a massage.” Did his voice betray him?

She bent her long torso side to side. “Would you?”

“You bet.”

She turned her back to him, pointing out on the figured bed-jacket where it hurt. “No no no honey,” he said as though to a child. “Look. Lie down here. Put the pillow under your chin—right. Now I sit here—just move a little—let me take my shoes off. Comfy?” He began, feeling her fever-heat through the thin jacket. “That album,” he said, not having for a moment forgotten it.

“Oh,” she said, her voice low and gruff as he pressed the bellows of her lungs. “Auberon’s pictures.” Her hand reached out and rested on the cover. “When we were kids. Art pictures.”

“Art pictures like what?” George said, working the bones where her wings would he if she had wings.

As though she couldn’t help it she raised the cover, put it down again. “He didn’t know,” she said. “He didn’t think they were dirty. Oh, they’re not.” She opened the book. “Lower. There. Lower more.”

“Oho,” George said. George had once known these naked, pearl-gray children, abstracted here and more carnal for not being flesh at all. “Let’s take this shirtie off,” he said. “That’s better…”

She turned the album’s pages with abstracted slowness, touching certain of the pictures as though she wished to feel the texture of the day, the past, the flesh.

Here were Alice and she on the stippled stones by a waterfall which plunged madly out-of-focus behind them. In the hazy foreground leaves, some law of optics inflated droplets of sunlight into dozens of white disembodied eyes round with wonder. The naked children (Sophie’s dark aureoles were puckered like unblown flowers, like tiny closed lips) looked down into a black, silken pool. What did they see there that kept their lashy eyes lowered, that made them smile? Below the image, in a neat hand, was the picture’s title: August. Sophie’s fingers traced the ray of lines where Alice’s thigh creased at the pelvis, lines tender and finely-drawn as though her skin were thinner then than it would become. Her silver calves lay together, and her long-toed feet, as though they were beginning to be changed into a mermaid’s tail.

Small pictures clipped to the pages with black corners. Sophie wide-eyed, open-mouthed, feet wide apart and arms high, all open, a Gnostic’s X of microcosmic child-woman-kind, her yet-uncut hair wide too and white—thus golden in fact—against an obscure cave of summer-dark trees. Alice undressing, stepping one-footed from her white cotton panties, her plump purse already beginning to be clothed with crisp fair hair. The two girls opening through time like the magic flowers of nature films as George hungrily looked through Auberon’s eyes, double-peeping at the past. Stop here a minute…

She held the page open there, while he went on, shifting his position and his hands; her legs opening across the sheets made a certain sound. She showed him the Orphan Nymphs. Flowers twined in their hair, they lay full length entwined on the grassy sward. They had their hands to each other’s cheeks, and their eyes were heavy and they were on the point of kissing open-mouthed: acting out lonely consolation, it might be, for an art-picture of innocence at once orphaned and faëry, but not acting; Sophie remembered. Her nerveless hand slipped from the page and her eyes too lost their grasp of it; it didn’t matter.

“Do you know what I’m going to do,” George asked, unable not to.

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.” An exhalation only. “Yes.”

But she didn’t, not really; she had leapt across that gap Consciousness again, had saved herself from falling there, had landed safely (able to fly) on the far side, within that pearl-toned afternoon that had no night.

The Least Trumps

“As in any deck,” Cloud said, taking their velvet bag from the tooled case and then the cards themselves from the bag, “there are fifty-two cards for the fifty-two weeks of the year, four suits for the four seasons, twelve court cards for the twelve months and, if you count them right, three hundred and sixty-four pips for the days of the year.”

“A year’s got three-sixty-five,” George said.

“This is the old year, before they knew better. Throw another log on the fire, will you, George?”

She began to lay out his future as he fooled with the fire. The secret he had within him—or above him asleep actually— warmed his center and made him grin, but left his extremities deathly cold. He unrolled the cuffs of his sweater and drew his hands within. They felt like a skeleton’s.

“Also,” said Cloud, “there are twenty-one trumps, numbered from zero to twenty. There are Persons, and Places, and Things, and Notions.” The big cards fell, with their pretty emblems of sticks and cups and swords. “There’s another set of trumps,” Cloud said. “The ones I have here are not as great as those; those have oh the sun and the moon and large notions. Mine are called—my mother called them—the Least Trumps.” She smiled at George. “Here is a Person. The Cousin.” She placed that in the circle and thought a moment.

“Tell me the worst,” George said. “I can take it.”

“The worst,” said Daily Alice from the deep armchair where she sat reading, “is just what she can’t tell you.”

“Or the best either,” said Cloud. “Just a bit of what might be. But in the next day, or the next year, or the next hour, that I can’t tell either. Now hush while I think.” The cards had grown into interlocking circles like trains of thought, and Cloud spoke to George of events that would befall him; a small legacy, she said, from someone he never knew, but not money, and left him by accident. “You see, here’s the Gift; here the Stranger in this place.”

Watching her, chuckling at the process and also helplessly at what had occurred to him that afternoon (and which he intended to repeat, creeping quiet as a mouse when all were asleep), George didn’t notice Cloud fall silent before the completing pattern; didn’t see her lips purse or her hand hesitate as she placed the last card in the center. It was a Place: the Vista.

“Well?” George said.

“George,” she said, “I don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?”

“Exactly.” She reached for her box of cigarettes, shook it and found it empty. She had seen so many displays, so many possible falls had grown into her consciousness that sometimes they overlapped; with a sense like déjà vu, she felt she was looking not at a single arrangement but at one of a series, as though some old display she had made were to be labeled “Continued,” and here, without warning, was the continuation. Yet it was all George’s fall too.

“If,” she said, “the Cousin card is you.” No. That wouldn’t do. There was something, some fact she didn’t know.

George of course knew what it was, and felt a sudden strangulation, a fear of discovery absurd on the face of it but intense anyway, as though he had walked into a trap. “Well,” he said, finding voice. “That’s enough anyway. I’m not sure I want to know my every future move.” He saw Cloud touch the Cousin card; then the Thing called Seed. Oh Christ, he thought; and just then the station wagon’s hoarse horn was heard in the drive.

“They’ll need help unloading,” Daily Alice said, struggling to rise from the grasp of her armchair. George jumped up. “No no, honey, oh no, not in your condition. You sit tight.” He went from the room, cold hands thrust in his sleeves like a monk.

Alice laughed and picked up her book again. “Did you scare him, Cloud? What did you see?”

Cloud only looked down at the pattern she had made.

For some time now she had begun to think she had been wrong about the Least Trumps, that they were not telling her of the small events of lives close to her-or rather that those small events were parts of chains, and the chains were great events; very great indeed.

The Vista card in the center of her pattern showed a meeting of corridors or aisles. Down each corridor was an endless vista of doorways, each one different, an arch then a lintel then pillars and so on till the artist’s invention ran out and the fineness of his woodcutting (which was very fine) could no longer make distinctions. You could see, down those aisles, other doors which led off in other directions, perhaps each showing vistas as endless and various as this one.

A juncture, doorways, turnings, a moment only when all the ways could be seen at once. This was George—all this. He was that vista, though he didn’t know it and she couldn’t think how to tell him. The vista wasn’t his: he was the vista. It was she who looked down it at the possibilities. And could not express them. She only knew—for sure now—that all the patterns she had ever cast were parts of one pattern, and that George had done or would do—or was at that moment doing—something that made an element in that pattern. And in any pattern, the elements do not stand alone; they are repeated, they are linked. What could it be?

Around her in the house the sounds of her family came, calling and hauling and treading the stairs. But it was into this place that she stared, into the prospect of endless branchings, corners, corridors. She felt that perhaps she was in that place; that there was a door just behind her, that she sat here between it and the first of the doors pictured on the card; that if she turned her head she might see an endless prospect of arch and lintel behind her too.

Only Fair

All night especially in cold weather the house was accustomed to speak softly to itself, perhaps because of its hundreds of joints and its half-floors and its stone parts piled on wooden. It tocked and groaned, grunted and squeaked; something gave way in an attic and fell, which caused something to come loose in a cellar and drop. The squirrels in the airspaces scratched and the mice explored the walls and halls. One mouse late at night went on tiptoe, a bottle of gin under his arm and a finger on his lips, trying to remember where Sophie’s room might be. He nearly tripped on an unexpected step; all steps in this house were unexpected.

Within his head it was still noon. The Pellucidar had not worn off, but it had turned evil, as it will do, not prodding flesh and consciousness any the less, but now with a cruel malice and not in fun. His flesh was contracted and defensive and he doubted that it would uncoil even for Sophie supposing he could find her. Ah: the lamp over a painting had been left on, and by it he saw the doorknob he wanted, he was sure of it. He was about to step quickly to it when it turned, spookily; he stepped back into the shadows, and the door opened. Smoky came out, an old dressing gown over his shoulders (the kind, George noticed, that has a braided edge of dark and light hues around the collar and pocket) and shut the door carefully and silently. He stood for a moment then, and seemed to sigh; then he went off around the corner.

Wrong damn door, George thought; imagine if I’d gone into their room, or is it the kids’ room? He went away, utterly confused now, searching hopelessly through the coiled nautilus of the second floor, tempted once to go down a floor; maybe in his madness he had gotten onto a matching upper floor and forgotten he had done so. Then Somehow he found himself in front of a door that Reason told him must be hers, though other senses disputed it. He opened it in some fear and stepped inside.

Tacey and Lily lay sweetly asleep beneath the sloping ceiling of a dormer room. By the nightlight he could see spectral toys, the glittering eye of a bear. The two girls, one still in a jailhouse crib, didn’t stir, and he was about to shut the door on them when he knew there was someone else in the room, near Tacey’s bed. Someone… He peered around the edge of the door.

Someone had just drawn from within the fine folds of his night-gray cloak a night-gray bag. George couldn’t see his face for the wide Spanish night-gray hat he wore. He stepped to the crib where Lily lay, and with fingers clothed in night-gray gloves took from his bag a pinch of something, which delicately he dispensed from between thumb and finger above her sleeping face. Sand descended in a dull-gold trickle to her eyes. He turned away then and was putting away his bag when he seemed to sense George turned to stone at the doorway. He glanced at him over the tall collar of his cloak, and George looked into his placid, heavy-lidded, night-gray eyes. Those eyes regarded him for a moment with something like pity, and he shook his heavy head, as who should say Nothing for you, son; not tonight. Which was after all only fair. And then he turned around, the tassel swinging on his hat, and went away with a low snap of his cloak to elsewhere and others more deserving.

So when George at last found his own cheerless bed (in the imaginary bedroom as it happened) he lay sleepless for hours, his withered eyeballs starting from his head. He cradled the gin bottle in his arms, tugging now and again at its cold and acid comfort, the night and day growing confused and raggedy on the still-burning Catherine-wheel of his consciousness. Only he did come to understand that the first room he had tried to enter, the one he saw Smoky come out of, was indeed Sophie’s, had to be. The shudder-starting rest of it dissolved as the sparkling synapses one by one mercifully began to bum out.

Toward dawn he watched it begin to snow.

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

Agreement with Newton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letters to Santa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Room for One More

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

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

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

Though of course Daily Alice had to be told.

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

“Smoky,” she said.

“Oh, Sophie,” Alice said. “No.”

“Yes,” she said, defiant by the door of Alice’s room, unwilling to enter further in.

“I can’t believe it, that he would.”

“Well, you better,” Sophie said. “You’d better get used to it, because it’s not going away.”

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

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

“Didn’t you ever suspect?” Sophie asked. “Didn’t you ever think.

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” Sophie said. “I told him first.”

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

“He wasn’t… He didn’t…”

“Well, you’d better decide, hadn’t you? The two of you.”

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

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

“Yes,” Sophie said, lowering her eyes.

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

“Oh, Alice,” Sophie said. “How could you forget?”

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s a lie,” Sophie said.

“What?” Alice looked at her, puzzled. “What’s a lie, Soph?”

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

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

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

“Once or twice?”

“Well, three times.”

“You mean you…”

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

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

“But wait a minute,” Alice said. “If it wasn’t Smoky, who was it?

“Sophie?”

Sophie told her.

“No,”

“Yes.”

“Of all people. But—how can you be sure? I mean…”

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

“George Mouse,” Alice said. “Of all people. Sophie, that’s practically incest.”

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

“Well, then he…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She squeezed Sophie suddenly, and said “Ah!”

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

A Gift They Had to Give

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

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

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

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

“Oh?”

“I… I forced myself on her, really. I mean I plotted it, I… like a, like a, well.”

“Mmm.”

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

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

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

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

“I promised I’d take care of it, and all. And be responsible. I had to.”

“Of course. That’s only right.”

“And it’s over now. I swear it, Alice, it is.”

“Don’t say that,” she said. “You never know.”

“No!”

“Well,” she said, “there’s always room for one more.”

“Oh don’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I deserve it.”

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

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

“Smoky,” she said. “Smoky, don’t. Listen. About this kid.”

“Yes.”

“Do you hope it’s a boy or a girl?”

“Alice… !”

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

Old World Bird

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

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

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it building a nest there?”

“Starting to.”

“You know what it looks like?”

“Yes.”

“A stork.”

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

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

Lucy, then Lilac

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

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

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

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

“See, Lucy? See the baby? Just like you.”

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

“Lily!” Mom said. “What a terrible thing to say!”

“Well, she won’t.” She looked to Tacey: “Will she?”

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

“And she’ll come back,” Lily said. “Later.”

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

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

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

Little, Big

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

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

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

“And what,” Daily Alice asked indulgently, “is a camelopard?”

“A giraffe, in fact,” Smoky said. “A camel-leopard. A camel with leopard’s spots.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solstice Night

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

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

“See how she sleeps away.”

“Yes, and the babe asleep in her arms.”

“My, she holds it tight.”

“Not so tight.”

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

“Well, take it, then.”

“Why don’t you if you’re so anxious.”

“Let’s all.”

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

“You were to bring it.”

“Not I.”

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

“My. Not very like, is it.”

“What’s to be done?”

“Breathe on it.”

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

“That’ll do.”

“It’s very like.”

“Now take the…”

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

“Holding fast.”

“Take the child, we’ll wake the mother.”

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

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

“Now to be gone.”

“Easily said. Not the way we came.”

“Down the stairs and out their way.”

“If we must.”

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

In All Directions

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

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

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

“You gave me a start,” she said.

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

“Listen to that wind,” said Cloud.

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

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

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

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” said Daily Alice.

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

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

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

“Everything’s all right, though,” he said.

“Yes.”

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

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

What smile did it remind him of?

“Everything’s okay,” she said.

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

“Do you smell a funny smell?” he said.

“Yes. No. I did. It’s gone now.”

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