Little, Big

The years after baby Lilac was rapt from her sleeping mother’s arms were the busiest Mrs. Underhill could remember in a long (in fact as-good-as-eternal) life. Not only was there Lilac’s education to attend to, and a watch kept just as ever on the rest of them, but there were as well all the councils, meetings, consultations and celebrations, multiplying as the events they had all so long nursed into being came more and more rapidly to pass; and all this in addition to her usual tasks, each composed of countless details no one of which could be skimped or scamped.

A Time and a Tour

But look how she had succeeded! On a day in November a year after the boy Auberon followed imaginary Lilac into the dark of the woods, and lost her, Mrs. Underhill quite otherwhere measured the real Lilac’s golden length with a practiced eye. She was, at just past eleven years old, as tall as bent Mrs. Underhill; her chicory-blue eyes, clear as brook water, were level with the old ones which studied her. “Very good,” she said. “Very, very good.” She circled Lilac’s slim wrists with her fingers. She tilted up Lilac’s chin and held a buttercup beneath it. She measured with thumb and forefinger the span from aureole to aureole, and Lilac laughed, tickled. Mrs. Underhill laughed too, pleased with herself and with Lilac. There wasn’t a tinge of green to her biscuity skin, not a trace of absence in her eyes. So often Mrs. Underhill had seen these things go wrong, seen changelings grow dim and marrowless, become at Lilac’s age attenuated pieces of vague longing and good for nothing ever after. Mrs. Underhill was glad she had taken on the handrearing of Lilac. What if it had worn her to a raveling? It had succeeded, and there would be aeons in which to rest soon enough.

Rest! She drew herself up. There must be strength for the end. “Now, child,” she said. “What was it you learned from the bears?”

“Sleep,” Lilac said, looking doubtful.

“Sleep indeed,” said Mrs. Underhill. “Now…”

“I don’t want to sleep,” Lilac said. “Please.”

“Well, how do you know till you’ve tried it? The bears were comfortable enough.”

Lilac, pouting, overturned a darkling beetle which was just then crossing her instep, and righted it again. She thought of the bears in their warm cave, oblivious as snow. Mrs. Underhill (who knew the names of many creatures, as every naturalist should) introduced them to her: Joe, Pat, Martha, John, Kathy, Josie, and Nora. But they made no response, only drew breath all together, and let it out, and drew it again. Lilac, who had never closed her eyes except to blink or play hide-and-seek since the night she woke in Mrs. Underhill’s dark house, stood bored and repelled by the seven sleepers, like seven sofas in their lumpish indifference. But she took her lesson from them; and when Mrs. Underhill came for her in the spring, she had learned it well, and for a reward Mrs. Underhill showed her sea-lions asleep in northern waters bobbing in the waves, and albatrosses in southern skies asleep on the wing; still she hadn’t slept, but at least she knew how.

But now the time had come.

“Please,” Lilac said, “I will if I must, only…”

“No ifs, ands, or buts,” Mrs. Underhill said. “There are times that just go by, and times that come. This time’s come.”

“Well,” Lilac said, desperate, “can I kiss everyone goodnight?”

“That would take years.”

“There are bedtime stories,” Lilac said, her voice rising. “I want one.”

“All the ones I know are in this one, and in this one it’s now the time you fall asleep.” The child before her crossed her arms slowly, still thinking; a dark cast came over her face; she would fight this one out. And like all grannies faced with intransigence, Mrs. Underhill bethought her how she might give in—with dignity, so as not to spoil the child. “Very well,” she said. “I haven’t time to argue. There’s a tour I was to take, and if you’ll promise to be good, and after take your nap, I’ll take you too. It might be educational…”

“Oh yes!”

“And education after all was all the point…”

“It was!”

“Well then.” Seeing her excitement, Mrs. Underhill felt for the first time something like pity for the child, how she would be long bound up in the vines and tendrils of sleep, as quiescent as the dead. She rose. “Listen now! Hold tight to me, great thing though you’ve become, and nor eat nor touch a single thing you see…” Lilac had leapt up, her nakedness pale and alight as a wax candle in Mrs. Underhill’s old house. “Wear this,” she said, taking a tiny green three-clawed leaf from within her clothes, licking it with a pink tongue, and sticking it to Lilac’s forehead, “and you’ll see what I say you’ll see. And I think…” There was a heavy beating of wings outside, and a long broken shadow passed over the windows. “I think we can go. I needn’t tell you,” she said, raising a warning finger, “that no matter what you’re not to speak to anyone you see, not anyone,” and Lilac nodded solemnly.

Rainy-day Wonder

The stork they rode flew high and fast over swift-unfolding brown and gray November landscapes, but still perhaps Somehow within other borders, for Lilac naked on her back felt neither warm nor cold. She held tight to folds of Mrs. Underhill’s thick clothing, and clutched the stork’s heaving shoulders with her knees, the smooth oiled feathers beneath her thighs soft and slippery. With taps of a stick, here, there, Mrs. Underhill guided the stork up, down, right and left.

“Where do we go first?” Lilac asked.

“Out,” Mrs. Underhill said, and the stork dove and twisted; beneath, far off but coming closer, a large and complex house appeared.

Since babyhood, Lilac had seen this house many times in dreams (how it could be she dreamt but didn’t sleep she never thought about; there was much that Lilac, raised the way she had been, had never thought about, knowing no different way the world and selfhood might be organized, just as Auberon never wondered why three times a day he sat at a table and put food into his face). She didn’t know, though, that when she dreamt she walked the long halls of that house, touching the papered walls hung with pictures and thinking What? What could this be?, that then her mother and her grandmother and her cousins dreamt—not of her, but of someone like her, somewhere else. She laughed when, now, from the stork’s back, she saw the house entire and recognized it instantly: as when the blindfold was lifted from her in a game of blindman’s-bluff and the mysterious features she had been touching, the nameless garments, were revealed to be those of someone well-known, someone smiling.

It grew smaller as they grew closer. It shrank, as though running away. If that goes on, Lilac thought, by the time we’re close enough to look in its windows, one of my eyes only will be able to see in at a time, and won’t they be surprised inside as we go by, darkening the windows like a stormcloud! “Well, yes,” Mrs. Underhill said, “if it were one and the same; but it’s not, and what they’ll see, or rather not see (I should think), is stork, woman and child about a midge’s size or smaller, and never pay it the least never-mind.”

“I can’t,” said the stork beneath them, “quite feature that.”

“Neither can I,” Lilac said laughing.

“Doesn’t matter,” Mrs. Underhill said. “See now as I see, and it’s all one for the purpose.”

Even as she spoke, Lilac’s eyes seemed to cross, then right themselves; the house rushed greatly toward them, rose up housesized to their stork’s size (though she and Mrs. Underhill were smaller—another thing for Lilac not to think to ask about). From on high they sailed down to Edgewood, and its towers round and square bloomed like sudden mushrooms, bowing neatly before them as they flew over, and the walls, weedy drives, porte-cocheres and shingled wings altered smoothly in perspective too, each according to its own geometries.

At a touch of Mrs. Underhill’s stick the stork tipped its wings and fell sharply to starboard like a fighter plane. The house changed faces as they swooped, Queen Anne, French Gothic, American, but Lilac didn’t notice; her breath was snatched away; she saw the house’s trees and angles uptilt and right themselves as the stork pulled out of her dive, saw the eaves rush up, then closed her eyes, clinging tighter. When her maneuver was completed and the stork was steady again, Lilac opened her eyes to see they were in the shadow of the house, circling to perch on a flinty belvedere outcropping on the house’s most Novembery side.

“Look,” Mrs. Underhill said when the stork had folded her wings. Her stick like a knuckly finger indicated a narrow ogive window, casements ajar, kitty-corner to where they stood. “Sophie asleep.”

Lilac could see her mother’s hair, very like her own, displayed on the pillow, and her mother’s nose peeking from under the coverlet. Asleep… Lilac’s bringing-up had trained her to pleasure (and to purpose, though she didn’t know it), not to affection and attachments; rainy days could bring tears to her clear eyes, but wonder, not love, shook her young soul most. So for a long time as she looked within the dim bedroom at her motionless mother, a chain of feelings was knitted within her for which she had no name. Rainyday wonder. Often they had told her, laughing, how her hands had gripped her mother’s hair, and how with scissors they had cut the hair to free her, and she’d laughed too; now she wondered what it would be like to be laid against that person; down within those covers, her cheek on that cheek, her fingers in that hair, asleep. “Can we,” she said, “go closer to her?”

“Hm,” said Mrs. Underhill. “I wonder.”

“If we’re small as you say,” the stork said, “why not?”

“Why not?” Mrs. Underhill said. “We’ll try.”

They fell from the belvedere, the stork laboring under her load to rise, neck straining, feet climbing. The casements ahead grew big as though they came closer, but for a long time they came no closer; then, “Now,” said Mrs. Underhill, and tapped with her stick, and they swooped in a vertiginous arc through the open casement and into Sophie’s bedroom. As they flew between floor and ceiling toward the bed, they would have appeared to an observer (if such a one were possible) to be the size of the bird one makes of two linked hands waving.

“How did that work?” Lilac asked.

“Don’t ask me how,” Mrs. Underhill said. “Anywhere but here it wouldn’t.” She added thoughtfully, as they circled the bedpost: “And that’s the point, about the house, isn’t it?”

Sophie’s flushed cheek was a hill, and her open mouth a cave; her head was forested in golden curls. Her breathing was as slow and low a sound as a whole day makes together. The stork stalled at the bed’s head and turned to coast back toward the arable lands of the patchwork quilt. “What if she woke?” Lilac said.

“You dasn’t!” Mrs. Underhill cried out, but it was too late; Lilac had loosed her grip of Mrs. Underhill’s cloak and as they passed, inspired by an emotion like mischief but fiercer by far, had taken hold of a coiling rope of golden hair and tugged. The jolt nearly upset them; Mrs. Underhill flailed with her stick, the stork squawked and stalled, they circled Sophie’s head again, and still Lilac hadn’t released the hank she held. “Wake up!” she shouted.

“Bad child! Oh horrible!” Mrs. Underhill cried.

“Squawk!” said the stork.

“Wake up!” Lilac called, hand cupped by her cheek.

“Away!” cried Mrs. Underhill, and the stork beat strongly toward the casement, and Lilac, if she weren’t to be pulled from the stork’s back, had to release her mother’s hair. One thick strand as long as a towline came away in her fingers, and laughing, shrieking with fear of falling, and trembling head to foot, she had time to see the bedclothes heave vastly before they reached the casement again. Just outside, like a sheet suddenly shaken open, and with a noise like that, they became again stork-sized to the house, and mounted quickly to the chimney-pots. The hair that Lilac held, three inches long now and so fine she couldn’t hold it, slipped from her fingers and sailed away glittering.

Sophie said “What?” and sat bolt upright. More slowly she lay back again amid the pillows, but her eyes didn’t close. Had she left that casement open? The end of a curtain was waving goodbye madly out of it. It was deathly cold. What had she dreamt? Of her great-grandmother (who died when Sophie was four). A bedroom full of pretty things, silver-backed brushes and tortoise-shell combs, a music-box. A glossy china figurine, a bird with a naked child and an old woman on its back. A big blue glass ball as fine as a soap bubble. Don’t touch it, child: a voice dim as the dead’s from within the ivory-lace bedclothes. Oh do be careful. And all the room, all of life, distorted, made blue, in the ball; made strange, gorgeous, unified because spherical, within the ball. Oh child, oh careful: a weeping voice. And the ball slipping from her grasp, falling as slow as a soap bubble toward the parquet.

She rubbed her cheeks. She put out a foot, wondering, toward her slippers. (Smashing on the floor, without a sound, only her great-grandmother’s voice saying Oh, oh, child, what a loss.) She ran a hand through her hair, impossibly tangled, elf-locks Momdy called them. A blue glass ball smashing; but what had come before that? Already it had fled from her. “Well,” she said, and yawned, and stood upright. Sophie was awake.

That’s the Lot

The stork was fleeing Edgewood when Mrs. Underhill pulled herself together.

“Hold hard, hold hard,” she said soothingly. “The harm’s been done.”

Lilac behind her had fallen silent.

“I just want,” the stork said, leaving off her furious wing-beats, “none of the blame for this to fall on me.”

“No blame,” Mrs. Underhill said.

“If punishments are to be handed out…” the stork said.

“No punishments. Don’t worry your long red beak about it.”

The stork fell silent. Lilac thought she should volunteer to take whatever blame there might be, and soothe the beast, but didn’t; she pressed her cheek into Mrs. Underhill’s coarse cloak, filled again with rainy-day wonder.

“Another hundred years in this shape,” the stork muttered, “is all I need.”

“Enough,” said Mrs. Underhill. “It may be all for the best. In fact how could it be otherwise? Now”—she tapped with her stick—“there’s still much to see, with time a-wasting.” The stork banked, turning back toward the multiple housetops. “Once more around the house and grounds,” said Mrs. Underhill, “and then off.”

As they climbed over the broken, every-which-way mountains and valleys of the roof, a small round window in a particularly peculiar cupola opened, and a small round face looked out, and down, and up. Lilac (though she had never seen his real face before) recognized Auberon, but Auberon didn’t see her.

“Auberon,” she said, not to call him (she’d be good now), but only to name him.

“Paul Pry,” said the stork, for it was from this window that Doc had used to spy on her and her chicks when she had nested here. Thank it all, that part was over! The round window closed.

Mrs. Underhill pointed out long-legged Tacey as they came over the house. Gravel spun from beneath her bike’s slim tires as she shot around a corner of the house, making for the once-trim little Norman farmhouse which had been stables once and then garage—the old wooden station wagon slept here in the dark—and was now also where Bumbum and Jane Doe and their many offspring had their hutches. Tacey dropped her bike at the back entrance (seeming, to Lilac over her head, to be a complex scurrying figure suddenly coming apart into two pieces) and the stork with a wingbeat rose out over the Park. Lily and Lucy walked a path there, arm in arm, singing; the sounds they made rose up to Lilac faintly. The path they walked intersected another, which ran past the leafless hedges wild now as madman’s hair, stuck full of dead leaves and small birds’ nests. Daily Alice loitered there, a rake in her hand, watching the hedge where perhaps she had seen a bird’s or an animal’s movement; and, when they had gained a bit more altitude, Lilac could see Smoky far down the same path, eyes on the ground, books under his arm.

“Is that…” Lilac asked.

“Yes,” Mrs. Underhill said.

“My father,” Lilac said.

“Well,” Mrs. Underhill said, “one of them anyway,” and guided the stork to swoop that way. “Now mind you mind, and no tricks.”

How odd people looked from right above, the egg of the head in the center, a left foot seeming to emerge from the back of it, a right foot from the front, then the reverse. Smoky and Alice at last saw each other, and Alice waved, her hand also seeming extruded from the head, like an ear. The stork swooped low beside them as they met, and they took on more human shape.

“How’s tricks?” Alice said, putting the rake under her arm like a shotgun and thrusting her hands in the pockets of her denim jacket.

“Tricks is good,” Smoky said. “Grant Stone threw up again.”

“Outside?”

“At least outside. Amazing how it quiets things down. For a minute. An object-lesson.”

“About…”

“Stuffing a dozen marshmallows into your face on the way to school? I don’t know. The ills that flesh is heir to, Mortality. I look very grave and say, ‘I guess we can go on now.’

Alice laughed, and then looked sharply left, where a movement had caught her eye, either a far-off bird or a last fly nearby; saw nothing. Did not hear Mrs. Underhill, who had been regarding her tenderly, say Bless you, dear, and watch the time; only she didn’t speak again all the way to the house, nor did she hear much of what Smoky told her about school; she was absorbed in a feeling she had felt before, that the earth, unimaginably massy as it was, turned beneath her only because she walked it, like a treadmill. Peculiar. When they came close to the house, she saw Auberon flee from it as though pursued; he gave a glance at his parents, but no acknowledgement, turning a corner and disappearing. And from an upstairs window she heard her name called: Sophie stood at her casement window. “Yes?” Alice called, but Sophie said nothing, only looked down at them both in wonderment, as though it had been years and not hours since she’d seen them last.

The stork glided over the Walled Garden and then, wings cupped, skimmed the ground between the avenue of sphinxes, all but featureless now and more silent than ever. Ahead, running the same way, was Auberon. In two flannel shirts (one like a jacket) grown somewhat small in a burst of growing he was doing, but still buttoned at the wrist; his long-skulled head balanced on a skinny neck, his sneakered feet pigeon-toed a bit. He ran a few steps, walked, ran again, talking to himself in a low voice.

“Some prince,” Mrs. Underhill said in a low voice as they caught up to him. “A lot of labor there.” She shook her head. Auberon ducked, hearing wingbeats at his ear as the stork rose up past him, and though he didn’t stop walk-running, his head swiveled to see a bird he couldn’t see. “That’s the lot,” said Mrs. Underhill. “Away!”

Lilac looked down as they rose away, and kept on looking down at Auberon growing smaller. In her growing-up Lilac (no matter that Mrs. Underhill strictly forbade it) had spent long days and nights alone. Mrs. Underhill herself had her enormous tasks, and the attendants set to wait on Lilac as often as not had games of their own they wanted to play, amusements the thick, fleshly, stupid human child could never grasp or join. Oh, they had caught it when Lilac was found wandering in halls and groves she had no business to be in yet (startling once with a thrown stone her great-grandfather in his melancholy solitude) but Mrs. Underhill could think of no help for it, and muttered “All part of her Education,” and went off to other climes and spaces that needed her attention. But in all this there was one playmate who had always been with her when she liked, who had always done her bidding without a moment’s hesitation, who had never grown tired or cross (the others could be, sometimes, not only cross but cruel) and always felt as she did about the world. That he had also been imaginary (“Who’s the child always talking to?” asked Mr. Woods, crossing his long arms, “and why amn’t I allowed to sit in my own chair?”) hadn’t really distinguished him from a lot that went on in Lilac’s odd childhood; that he had gone away, one day, on some excuse, hadn’t really surprised her; only now, as she watched Auberon lope toward the castellated summer house on an urgent mission, she did wonder what this real one—not very like her own Auberon really, but the same, there was no doubt of it—had been doing through all her growing up. He was very small now, pulling open the door of the Summer House; he glanced behind him as though to see if he had been followed; then “Away!” cried Mrs. Underhill, and the Summer House bowed beneath them (showing a patched roof like a tonsured head) and they were off, high and gaining speed.

A Secret Agent

In the Summer House Auberon unscrewed his fountain pen even before he sat down at the table there (though he firmly shut and hooked the door). He took from the table’s drawer a locked imitation-leather five-year diary from some other five years, opened it with a tiny key from his pocket, and, flipping to a page in a long-ago unrecorded March, he wrote: “And yet it does move.”

He meant by this the old orrery at the top of the house, from whose round window he had looked out as the stork bearing Lilac and Mrs. Underhill had passed. Everyone told him that the machinery which operated the planets in this antiquity was clabbered thick with rust and had been immovable for years. Indeed Auberon had tried the cogs and levers himself and couldn’t move them. And yet it did move: a vague sense he had had that the planets, sun and moon were not, on one visit, in quite the same places they had been on a previous visit he had now confirmed by rigorous tests. It does move: he was sure. Or pretty sure.

Just why they should all have lied to him about the orrery didn’t just at the moment concern him. All he wanted was the goods on them: proof that the orrery moved, and (much harder to get, but he would get it, the evidence was mounting) proof that they all knew very well that it moved and didn’t want him to know.

Slowly, after glancing at the entry he had made and wishing he had more to state, he shut and locked the diary and put it in the table drawer. Now what question could he think of, what seemingly chance remark could he let fall at dinner, that would cause someone—his great-aunt, no, far too practiced in concealments, expert at looks of surprise and puzzlement; or his mother; or his father, though there were times when Auberon thought his father might be as excluded as he was—to confess inadvertently? As the bowl of mashed potatoes went around, he might say “Slowly but surely, like the planets in the old orrery,” and watch their faces… No, too brazen, too obvious. He pondered, wondering what anyway would be for supper.

The Summer House he sat in wasn’t much changed from the time his namesake had lived and died there. No one had been able to think what to dowith the boxes and portfolios of pictures, or felt up to disturbing what seemed a careful order. So they only patched the roof against leaks, and sealed the windows; and thus it stayed while they thought. The image of it would now and then pass through one or another of their minds, particularly Doc’s and Cloud’s, and they would think of the past stored up there, but no one got around to unsealing it, and when Auberon came to take possession no one disputed him. It was headquarters now, and contained all things necessary for Auberon’s investigations: his magnifying glass (old Auberon’s in fact), his clack-clack folding measure and roll-up tape measure, the final edition of The Architecture of Country Houses, and the diary which contained his conclusions. It also contained all of Auberon’s pictures, which Auberon the younger had not yet begun to look into; the pictures that would end his quest as it had the elder’s, through vast superfluity of ambiguous evidence.

Even as it was he wondered if the thing about the orrery weren’t dumb after all, and his arrangement of string and pencilmarks open to more than one conclusion anyway. A blind alley, as lined with mum sphinxes as the others he had gone up. He stopped tilting back the old chair he sat in, stopped vigorously chewing the end of his pen. Evening was gathering; no evening more oppressive than one like this, in this month, though at nine years old he didn’t attribute his oppression to the day and the hour, or call it by that name. He only felt how hard it was to be a secret agent, to go in disguise as a member of his own family, trying to so insinuate himself among them that, without his ever asking a question (that would expose him instantly) the truth would be spilled in his presence because they would have no reason to doubt he was already privy to it.

Crows cawed away toward the woods. A voice, blown around the Park with odd alteration, called his name, and announced dinner. He felt, hearing the long-drawn melancholy vowels of his own name, at once sad and hungry.

The Worm Turned

Lilac saw sunset elsewhere.

“Magnificent!” Mrs. Underhill said. “And terrifying. Doesn’t it make your heart beat high?”

“But it’s all made of cloud,” Lilac said.

“Hush, dear,” Mrs. Underhill said. “Someone’s feelings could be hurt.”

Made of sunset was more correct: all of it, the thousand striped war-tents obscured in the wreathing smokes of orange watch’ fires, and their curling pennants striped the same in sunset colors; the black lines of horse or foot or both, picked out with silver weaponglint, that receded as far as the eye could see; the bright coats of captains and the dark gray of guns being drawn up under their command against empurpled harricadoes—the whole vast encampment, or was it a great flotilla of galleons, armed and under sail?

“A thousand years,” Mrs. Underhill said grimly. “Defeats, retreats, rear-guard actions. But no more. Soon…” The knobby stick was under her arm like a commander’s baton, her long chin was held high. “See?” she said. “There! Isn’t he brave?”

A figure, burdened with armor and with weighty responsibilities, walked the poop, or toured the breastworks; wind stirred his white whiskers as long almost as himself. The Generalissimo of all this. In one hand he held a wand; just then, the sunset altered, the tip of the wand caught fire. He gestured with it toward where the touch-holes on his guns would be, had they been guns, but then thought better of it. He lowered the wand, and it went out. From his broad belt he drew out a folded map, unfolded it, peered nearsightedly at it for some time, then refolded it, replaced it, and took up his heavy tread again.

“The die’s cast now,” Mrs. Underhill said. “No more retreating. The worm’s turned.”

“If you don’t mind,” the stork said, her voice faint between labored pants, “this altitude’s too much for me.”

“Sorry,” Mrs. Underhill said. “All done now.”

“Storks,” the stork panted, “are accustomed to sit down, once a league or so.”

“Don’t sit down there,” Lilac said. “You’ll sink right through.”

“Downward then,” Mrs. Underhill said. The stork ceased to pump her short wings, and began to descend, with a sigh of relief. The Generalissimo, hands on his gunwales or his machicolated belvedere, stared eagle-eyed into the distance, but failed to see Mrs. Underhill salute him smartly as they passed.

“Oh, well,” she said. “He’s as brave as they come, and it’s a fine show.”

“It’s a fake,” Lilac said. It had already shape-shifted into something even more harmless as they sank.

Curse the child, Mrs. Underhill thought irritably. It was convincing, convincing enough… Well. Perhaps they oughtn’t to have entrusted it all to that Prince: he was just too old. But there it is, she thought: we’re all old, all too old. Could it be they had waited too long, been too long patient, retreated one final furlong too many? She could only hope that, when the time at last came, the old fool’s guns would not all misfire, would at least give heart to their friends and frighten briefly those on whom they were trained.

Too old, too old. For the first time she felt that the outcome of it all, which could not be in doubt, could not, was in doubt. Well, it would all be over soon. Did not this day, this very evening, mark the beginning of the last long vigil, the last watch, before the forces were at last joined? “Now that’s the tour I promised you,” she said over her shoulder to Lilac. “And now…”

“Aw,” Lilac said.

“With no complaints…”

“Aaaawww…”

“We’ll take our nap.”

Lilac’s long-drawn note of complaint altered, surprisingly, in her throat, to something else, a sudden mouth-opening thing that stole over her like a spirit. It went on opening her mouth wider and wider—she hadn’t thought it could open so wide—and made her eyes close and water, and sucked a long draft of air into her lungs, which expanded with a will of their own to take it in, Then, just as suddenly, the spirit was gone, releasing her jaws and letting her exhale.

She blinked, smacking her lips, wondering what it was.

“Sleepy,” said Mrs. Underhill.

For Lilac had just yawned her first yawn. Her second came soon after. She put her cheek against the rough stuff of Mrs. Underhill’s broad cloak, and, Somehow no longer unwilling, closed her eyes.

Hidden Ones Revealed

When he was very young, Auberon had begun a collection of postmarks. On a trip with Doc to the post office in Meadowbrook, he had begun idly examining the wastebaskets, having nothing else to do, and had immediately come up with two treasures: envelopes from places that seemed fantastically distant to him, and looking remarkably crisp for having come so far.

It soon developed into a small passion, like Lily’s for bird’s nests. He insisted on accompanying whoever was traveling near a post office; he conned his friends’ mail; he gloated over distant cities, far states whose names begin with I, and, rarest of all, names from across the sea.

Then one day Joy Flowers, whose granddaughter had lived abroad for a year, gave him a fat brown bag full of envelopes sent her from every part of the world. He could hardly find on the map a place which had nOt stamped its name on one of these pieces of blue flimsy. Some of them came from places so distant they weren’t even in the alphabet he knew. And at a stroke his collection was complete, and his pleasure in it over. No discovery he could make in Meadowbrook’s post office could add to it. He never looked at it again.

It was the same with old Auberon’s photographs, when at last young Auberon discovered them to be more than a record of a large family’s long life. Beginning with the last, of a beardless Smoky in a white suit beside the birdbath made of dwarves which still stood by the Summer House door, he had dipped tentatively, then sorted curiously, and at last hunted greedily through the thousands of pictures big and small, elated with wonder and horror (here! Here was the secret, the hidden ones revealed, each image worth a thousand words) and for a week was almost unable to speak to his family for fear of revealing what he had learned—or rather thought he was about to learn.

For in the end the pictures illuminated nothing, because nothing illuminated them.

“Note thumb,” old Auberon would write on the back of a dim view of gray and black shrubbery. And there was, in the undisentanglable convolvulus, something that looked very much like a thumb. Good. Evidence. Another, though, would annul this evidence entirely, because (with only speechless exclamation marks on its back) here was an entire figure, a ghostly little miss in the leaves, with a trailing skirt of dew-glistening cobweb, pretty as a picture; and in the foreground, out of focus, the excited figure of a blond human child looking at the camera and pointing out the wee stranger. Now who could believe that? And if it was true (it couldn’t be, how it had been faked Auberon had no idea, but it was just too stupidly real not to be fake) then what good was the maybe-a-thumb-in-the-shrubbery and a thousand others just as obscure? When he had sorted a dozen boxes into the few impossible and the many unintelligible, and saw that there were dozens of boxes and portfolios yet to go, he shut them all up (with a mixed sense of relief and loss) and rarely thought about them again.

He never again opened the old five-year diary in which his own notes had been made either, after that. He returned the last edition of the Architecture of Country Houses to its place in the library. His own humble discoveries, or what had seemed like discoveries—the orrery, a few interesting slips of the tongue made by his great-aunt and his grandmother—heart-startling as they had once seemed, had been swamped by the thick flood of torturous pictures and worse notes on them which his namesake had made. He forgot about it all. His secret-agentry was over.

His secret-agentry was over, but he had by this time gone so long in disguise indetectably as a member of his family that by slow stages he had actually become one. (It often happens so with secret agents.) The secret that was not revealed in Auberon’s photographs lay, if it lay anywhere, in the hearts of his relatives; and Auberon had for so long pretended to know what they all knew (so that they would reveal it to him by accident) that he came to suppose he did know it as well as any of them; and like his evidences, and about the same time, he forgot about it. And since, if they had ever really known anything that he didn’t know, they too had all forgotten it or seemed to have forgotten it, then they were all equal and he was one of them. He even felt, just below consciousness, that he was aligned with all the rest of them in a conspiracy that excluded only his father: Smoky didn’t know, and didn’t know they knew he didn’t know. Somehow, rather than separating them from him, this joined them to Smoky all the more, as though they kept from him the secret of a surprise party planned for Smoky himself. And so for a while Auberon’s relations with his father grew a little easier.

But even though he stopped scrutinizing others’ motives and movements, a habit of secrecy about his own persisted in Auberon. He often put false faces over his actions, for no good reason. Certainly it wasn’t to mystify; even as a secret agent he hadn’t wanted to mystify anybody, a secret agent’s task is just the reverse of that. If he had a reason at all, it may have been only a desire to present himself in a milder, clearer light than he might otherwise have appeared in: milder and clearer than the dim-flaring lamps by which he perceived himself.

“Where are you off to in such a tear?” Daily Alice asked him as he wolfed his milk and cookies at the kitchen table after school. He was in this autumn the last Barnable still a scholar in Smoky’s school. Lucy had stopped going the year before.

“Play ball,” he said, his mouth full. “With John Wolf and those guys.”

“Oh.” She half-refilled the glass he held out to her. Good lord he had gotten big lately. “Well, tell John to tell his mother I’ll be over tomorrow with some soup and things, and see what she needs.” Auberon kept his eyes on his cookies. “Is she feeling any better, do you know?” He shrugged. “Tacey said… oh, well.” It seemed unlikely from Auberon’s air that he would go tell John Wolf that Tacey had said his mother was dying. Probably her simple message wouldn’t even be passed. But she couldn’t be sure. “What do you play?”

“Catcher,” he said quickly. “Usually.”

“I was a catcher,” Alice said. “Usually.”

Auberon put down the glass, slowly, thinking. “Do you think,” he said, “that people are happier when they’re alone, or with other people?”

She carried his glass and plate to the sink. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess… Well, what do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just wondered if…” What he wondered was whether it was a fact everyone knew, every grown-up anyway: that everyone is of course happiest alone, or the reverse, whichever it was. “I guess I’m happier with other people,” he said.

“Oh yes?” She smiled; since she faced the sink, he couldn’t see her. “That’s nice,” she said. “An extrovert.”

“I guess.”

“Well,” Alice said softly, “I just hope you don’t creep back in your shell again.”

He was already on his way out, stuffing extra cookies in his pockets, and didn’t stop, but a strange window had suddenly been flung open within him. Shell? Had he been in a shell? And—odder still—had he been seen to be in one, was it common knowledge? He looked through this window and saw himself for a moment, for the first time, as others saw him. Meanwhile his feet had taken him out the broad swinging doors of the kitchen, which grump-grumped behind him in their way, and through the raisin-odorous pantry, and out through the stillness of the long dining room, going toward his imaginary ball-game.

Alice at the sink looked up, and saw an autumn leaf blown by the casement, and called out to Auberon. She could hear his footsteps receding (his feet had grown even faster than the rest of him) and she picked up his jacket from the chair where he had left it, and went after him.

He was gone out of sight on his bike by the time she got out the front door. She called again, going down the porch stairs; and then noticed that she was outdoors, for the first time that day, and that the air was clear and tangy and large, and that she was aimless. She looked around herself. She could just see, extending beyond the corner of the house, a bit of the walled garden around the other side. On the stone ornament at its corner a crow was perched. It looked at her looking around herself—she couldn’t remember ever having seen one so close to the house before, they were fearless but wary—and flopped from its perch, and flapped with heavy wings away over the park. Cras, cras: that’s what Smoky said crows say in Latin. Cras, cras: “tomorrow, tomorrow.”

She walked around the walled garden. Its little arched door stood ajar, inviting her in, but she didn’t go in. She went around to the funny little walk bordered by hydrangeas that had once been in training to be ornamental shrubs, tall and orderly and cabbage-headed, but which had declined over the years into mere hydrangeas, and smothered the walk they were supposed to border, and obscured the view they were supposed to exhibit: two Doric pillars, leading to the path that went up the Hill. Still aimless, Alice walked along that walk (brushing from the last hydrangea blossoms a shower of papery petals like faded confetti) and started up the Hill.

Glory

Auberon circled back along the road that ran around Edgewood’s guardian stone wall, and at a certain point, dismounted. He climbed the wall (a fallen tree there and a weedy hummock on the other side made a stile) and hauled his bike over, wheeled it through the rustling gilded beechwood to the path, mounted again, and, glancing behind him, rode to the Summer House. He concealed the bike in the shed old Auberon had built.

The Summer House, warmed by September sun poured in through its big windows, was still and dusty. On the table where once his diary and spying equipment had lain, and where later he had sorted through Auberon’s pictures, there lay now a mass of scribbled-over papers, the sixth volume of Gregorovius’s Medieval Rome, a few other large books, and a map of Europe.

Auberon studied the top sheet, which he had written the day before:

The scene is in the Emperor’s tent outside Iconium. The Emperor is seated alone in an X-kind of chair. His sword is across his knees. He is wearing his armor but some of it has been taken off, and a servant is slowly polishing it, and sometimes he looks at the Emperor, but the emperor just looks straight ahead and doesn’t notice him. The emperor looks tired.

He considered this, and then mentally crossed out the last sentence. Tired wasn’t what he meant at all. Anybody can look tired. The Emperor Frederick Barbarossa on the eve of his last battle looked… well, what? Auberon uncapped his pen, thought, and recapped it again.

His play or screenplay (it might end up either, or be transmogrified into a novel) about the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa had in it Saracens and papal armies, Sicilian guerillas and potent paladins and princesses too. A congeries of romantic place-names where battles were fought by mobs of romantic personages. But what Auberon loved in these doings wasn’t anything that could be called romantic. In fact all that he wrote was only to bring forth that figure, that single figure on a chair: a figure seen in a moment of repose snatched between two desperate actions, exhausted after victory or defeat, hard clothes stained with war and wear. Above all it was a gaze: a calm, appraising look, without illusions, the look of someone coming to see that the odds against a course of action were insurmountable but the pressures to execute it irresistible. He was indifferent to the weather around him, and as Auberon described it, it was like him: harsh, indifferent, without warmth. His landscape was empty, save for a far tower with an aspect like his own, and perhaps a distant muffled rider bearing news.

Auberon had a name for all this: Glory. If it wasn’t what was meant by Glory, he didn’t care. His plot—who was to be master, that’s all—didn’t really much interest him; he was never able to grasp just what the Pope and Barbarossa were arguing about anyway. If someone had asked him (but no one would, his project had been begun in secrecy and years later would be burned in secrecy) what it was that had drawn him to this particular emperor, he wouldn’t have been able to say. A harsh ring in the name. The picture of him old, mounted, armed, on his last futile crusade (all crusades were futile to young Auberon). And then swept away by chance in that armor under the waters of a nameless Armenian river when his charger shied in the middle of the ford. Glory.

“The Emperor doesn’t look tired exactly, but…”

He marked this out too, angrily, and recapped his pen again. His huge ambition to delineate seemed suddenly insupportable, as though he might weep that he had to bear it alone.

I just hope you don’t creep back into your shell.

But he had worked so hard to make that shell look just like him. He thought everyone had been fooled, and they hadn’t been.

Dust swam in the sunlight still being cast into weighty blocks by the windows of the Summer House, but the place was growing chilly. Auberon put his pen away. Behind him on the shelves, old Auberon’s boxes and portfolios stared at the back of his head. Would it always be so? Always a shell, always secrets? For his own secrets seemed likely to separate him from the rest of them as surely as any secret they had kept from him could have. And all he wanted was to be the Barbarossa he imagined: without illusions, without confusions, without shameful secrets: ferocious sometimes, embittered maybe, but all of a piece from breast to back.

He shivered. What had become of his jacket, anyway?

Not Yet

His mother was drawing it over her shoulders as she climbed the hill, thinking: Who plays baseball in weather like this? Young maples along the path, surrendering early, had already flamed beside still-green sisters and brothers. Wasn’t this football or soccer weather? An extrovert, she thought, and smiled and shook her head: the glad hand, the easy smile. Oh dear… Since her children had stopped growing up quite so fast, the seasons had started going by Daily Alice faster: once, her children were different people in spring and fall, so much learning and sensing and laughing and weeping were packed into their age-long summers. She had hardly noticed that this fall had come. Maybe because she had only one child now to be readied ftr school. One and Smoky. Practically dutiless on autumn mornings with only one lunch to make, one sleepy body to chivvy from bath to breakfast, one bookstrap and one pair of boots to find.

And yet, as she went up the Hill, she felt huge duties calling to her.

She reached the stone table at the peak of the Hill, a little out of breath, and sat on the stone bench by it. Beneath it—a sorry mess, decayed and autumnal-looking—she glimpsed the pretty straw hat that Lucy had lost in June and mourned all summer. Seeing it, she felt sharply her children’s fragility, their danger, their helplessness before loss, before pain, before ignorance. She named them in order in her mind: Tacey, Lily, Lucy, Auberon. They rang like bells of different pitch, some truer than others, but all answering her pull: they were fine, really, all four, just as she always told Mrs. Wolf or Marge Juniper or whoever else inquired after them: “They’re fine.” No: the duties she felt calling her (and she felt them more intensely now, seated in the sunlight above a wide landscape) didn’t have to do with them, or with Smoky either. They had, Somehow, to do with that path upward, and this windy hill-top, and that sky raddled with fast-moving, pigeon-feather gray-and-white cloud, and this young autumn full (as every autumn so strangely is) of hope and expectation.

The feeling was intense, as though she were being drawn in or swept away; she sat motionless in its grip, marveling and a little frightened, expecting it to pass in a moment, like sensations of deja vu. But it didn’t pass.

“What?” she said to the day. “What is it?”

Mute, the day couldn’t answer: but it seemed to gesture to her, to tug at her familiarly, as though it had mistaken her for someone else. It seemed, and it would not stop seeming, just about to turn all at once to face in her direction, having heard her voice—as though she had all this time been looking at the wrong or back side of it (and of everything, always) and was now about to see it plain, as it really was: and it she, too: and still it couldn’t speak.

“Oh, what,” Daily Alice said, not knowing she spoke. She felt that she was dissolving helplessly into what she beheld, and at the same time had grown imperious enough to command it in every part; light enough to fly; yet so heavy that not the stone bench but the whole stone hill was her seat; awed, yet for some reason not surprised as she came to know what was being asked of her, what she was summoned to.

“No,” she said in reply; “no,” she said, softly, as she might have to a child who had by mistake taken hold of her hand or the skirt of her dress, thinking her its mother, turning up to her, inquiringly, its wondering face. “No.”

“Turn away,” she said, and the day did.

“Not yet,” she said, and rang the bells of her children’s names again. Tacey Lily Lucy Auberon. Smoky. Too much, too much yet to do; and yet there would come a time when, no matter how much was left to do, no matter how her daily duties had grown or shrunk away, a time when she could no longer refuse. She wasn’t unwilling, or afraid, though she thought that when the time came she would be afraid, and yet could not refuse… Astonishing, astonishing that there could be no end to growing bigger, she had thought years ago that she had grown so huge that she could grow no more, and yet she hadn’t even begun. But: “Not yet, not yet,” she said, as the day turned away; “not yet, there’s too much to do still; please, not yet.”

The Black Crow (or someone like him), far off invisible through the turning trees, called its call, heading home.

Cras. Cras.

What Smoky liked about his girls’ growing up was that, though they moved away from him, they did so (it seemed to him) less from any distaste or boredom than simply to accommodate a growth in their own lives: when they were kids, their lives and concerns—Tacey’s rabbits and music, Lily’s bird’s-nests and boy-friends, Lucy’s bewilderments—could all fit within the compass of his life, which was then replete; and then as they grew up and out, they no longer fit, they needed room, their concerns multiplied, lovers and then children had to be fitted in, he could no longer contain them unless he expanded too, and so he did, and so his own life got larger as theirs did, and he felt them to be no further from him than ever, and he liked that. What he didn’t like about their growing up was the same thing: that it forced him to grow, to enlarge, sometimes beyond what he felt the character he had come over the years to be encased in could stand.

Tossing and Turning

There had been one great advantage in having grown up anonymous when he had come to have children: for they could make out of him what they wanted, could think him kindly or strict, evasive or frank, jolly or glum, as their own tempers required. That was great, great to be Universal Father, nothing withheld from him, he bet (though he had no way to prove it) that his daughters had told him more of their secrets, grave, shameful, or hilarious, than most men’s did. But there were limits even to his flexibility, he couldn’t as time went on stretch as much as he had once done, he found himself less and less able to ignore it when his character, growing ever more lobsterlike and unsheddable, disapproved of or could not understand the Young.

Perhaps it was chiefly that which had come between him and his youngest child, his son Auberon. Certainly the commonest emotions Smoky remembered feeling about the boy were a sort of baffled irritation, and a sadness over the mysterious gulf that seemed fixed between them. Whenever he got up the nerve to try to learn what was with his son, Auberon had produced a complex and wellpracticed secretiveness that Smoky was helpless and even bored before; when Auberon had come to him, on the other hand, Smoky had seemed unable not to retreat into a bluff, know-nothing, standard-issue parent costume, and Auberon would too quickly retire. And it had grown not better but worse as the years went by, until at last Smoky, with outward head-shaking and reluctance, and inward relief, had seen him off on his strange quest to the City.

Maybe if they’d played ball more. Just gone out, son and dad, and tossed the old pill around on a summer afternoon. Auberon had always liked to play ball, Smoky knew, though he himself had never been either good at it or happy doing it.

He laughed at the insufficiency of this reverie. Just the sort of thing his character might suggest, in the face of his children’s inexplicability. Maybe, though, it had occurred to him because he sensed that some common touch, some ordinary gesture, might have crossed over what lay between him and his son; if there were something as wide that lay between him and his daughters, he had never noticed it, but of course it might well be there, disguised in the daily strangenesses of growing up today with a father who had grown up yesterday, or even the day before that.

None of his daughters had married, or seemed likely to, though he had now two grandchildren, Lily’s twins, and Tacey seemed ready to bear a child by Tony Buck. Smoky held no particular brief for marriage, though he couldn’t imagine life without his own, odd as it had proved to be; and as for fidelity, he had no right to speak at all. But he did find it distressing to think that his offspring would be more or less nameless, and that if this kept up might one day be describable only as race-horses are, by so-and-so out of soand-so. And he couldn’t help thinking that there was something embarrassingly obvious in the couplings of his daughters with their lovers, a shamelessness that marriage would have decently hid. Or rather his character thought so. Smoky himself mostly cheered their daring, their bravery, and wasn’t ashamed to admire their sexuality as he had always admired their beauty. Big girls now, after all. But still… well, he hoped they could ignore it when his character made noises, or caused him, for instance, to decline to visit Tacey and what’s-his-name when they were living together in a cave. A cave! His children seemed bent on recapitulating in their own lives the whole history of the race. Lucy gathered herbs for simples and Lucy read the stars and hung coral around her babies’ necks to ward off evil; Auberon with a knapsack set out to seek his fortune. And in her cave Tacey discovered fire. Just when the supply of electricity in the world seemed to be running out for good, too. Thinking of which, he listened to the clock chime the quarter hour, and wondered if he should go down and shut down the generator.

He yawned. The single lamp lit in the library made a pool of light he was reluctant to leave. There was a pile of books by his chair from which he had been choosing for school; the old ones had grown repulsive to the hand and eye from years of use, and boring beyond expression. Another clock chimed, one o’clock, but Smoky didn’t trust it. Outside in the corridor, a candle in her hand, a familiar wraith of nighttime passed: Sophie, still awake.

She went away—Smoky watched the changeful light on walls and furniture flash and dim—and then came back again.

“You still up?” she said, and at the same moment he asked the same of her.

“It’s awful,” she said, coming in. She wore a long white nightgown which gave her even more the air of an unlaid ghost. “Tossing and turning. Do you know that feeling? As though your mind’s asleep but your body’s awake—and won’t give in—and has to keep jumping from one position to another…”

“Just barely waking you up every time…”

“Yes, so your head can’t—can’t dive down, sort of, and really sleep, but it won’t give up either and wake up, and just keeps repeating the same dream, or the beginnings of one, and not getting anywhere…”

“Sorting over and over the same handful of nonsense, yup; until you have to give in, and get up…”

“Yes, yes! And you feel like you’ve been lying there for hours, struggling, and not sleeping at all. Isn’t that awful?”

“Awful.” He felt, but would never admit to, a sense of fitness that Sophie, long the champion sleeper, had come in recent years to be a fair insomniac, and knew now even better than Smoky, a chancy sleeper at the best of times, the pursuit of fleeing oblivion. “Cocoa,” he said. “Warm milk. With a little brandy. And say your prayers.” He’d given her all this advice before.

She knelt by his chair, covering her hare feet with the nightgown, and rested her head on his thigh. “I thought,” she said, “when I sort of snapped out of it, you know, the tossing and turning? I thought: she must be cold.”

“She?” he said. And then: “Oh.”

“Isn’t that dumb? If she’s alive, she’s not cold, probably; and if she’s—well, not alive…”

“Mm.” There was, there was Lilac, of course: he had been thinking with such self-satisfaction of how well he knew his daughters, and how well they liked him, his son Auberon the only grain of grit in his oyster: but there was his other daughter, his life was odder than it often appeared to him, Lilac was a dimension of mystery and grief he sometimes forgot. Sophie never forgot.

“You know what’s funny?” Sophie said. “Years ago, I used to think of her growing up. I knew she got older. I could feel it. I knew just what she looked like, how she’d look as she got older. But then it stopped. She got to be about… nine, or ten, I guess; and then I couldn’t imagine her getting any older.”

Smoky answered nothing, only stroked Sophie’s head softly.

“She’d be twenty-two now. Think of that.”

He thought of it. He had (twenty-two years ago) sworn before his wife that her sister’s child would be his, all the responsibility his. Her disappearance hadn’t altered that, but it had left him with no duties. He couldn’t imagine how to search for the real Lilac lost, when he had at length been told that she was lost, and Sophie had hid her awful ordeal with the false Lilac from him, and from all of them. He still didn’t know how it had ended: Sophie was gone for a day, and when she returned there was no more Lilac, false or true; she took to her bed, a cloud was lifted from the house, and a sadness entered it. That’s all. He was not to ask.

So much not to ask. It was a great art, that one. He had learned to deploy it as skillfully as a surgeon his art, or a poet his. To listen; to nod; to act on what he was told as though he understood it; not to offer criticism or advice, except of the mildest kind, just to show his interest and concern; to puzzle out. To stroke Sophie’s hair, and not try to deflect her sadness; to wonder how she had gone on with such a life, with such a sorrow at its heart, and never ask.

Well, if it came to that, though, his other three daughters were as great a mystery to him, really, as his fourth, only not a mystery it grieved him to contemplate. Queens of air and darkness, how had he come to engender them? And his wife: only he had so long ceased (since his honeymoon, since his wedding day) to question her that she was now no more a mystery (and no less) than clouds and stones and roses. If it came to that, the only one he could begin to understand (and criticize, and intrude on, and study) was his only son.

“Why do you suppose that is?” Sophie asked.

“Why what is?”

“That I can’t imagine her getting any older.”

“Well, hm,” Smoky said. “I don’t really know.”

She sighed, and Smoky stroked her head, running his fingers through her curls, sorting them out. They would never exactly go gray; though the gold faded from them, they still seemed like golden curls. Sophie was not one of those maiden aunts whose unused beauty comes to seem dried and pressed, like a flower—for one thing she was no maiden—but it did seem that her youth couldn’t be outgrown, that she had never and would never become a person of mature years. Daily Alice looked now, at almost fifty (fifty, good Lord) just as she ought, as though she had shed the successive skins of childhood and youth and come forth thus, whole. Sophie looked sixteen: only burdened with a lot of unnecessary years, almost unfairly, it seemed. Smoky wondered which, over the years, he had oftenest thought the more beautiful. “Maybe you need another Interest,” he said.

“I don’t need another Interest,” she said. “I need to sleep.”

It had been Smoky who, when Sophie had discovered with surprise and disgust how many hours there are in the day when it isn’t half-filled with sleep, had said that most people fill those hours with Interests of some kind, and had suggested Sophie take some up. Out of desperation she’d done so; the cards, of course, first, and when she wasn’t working with them she gardened, and paid visits, canned, read books by the dozen, made repairs around the house, always resenting that these Interests should be forced on her in the absence of her lost (why? why lost?) sweet sleep. She turned her head restlessly on Smoky’s thigh as though it were her unquiet pillow. Then she looked up at him. “Will you sleep with me?” she said. “I mean sleep.”

“Let’s make cocoa,” he said.

She got up. “It seems so unfair,” she said, casting her eyes upward at the ceiling. “All of them up there fast asleep and I have to haunt the place.”

But in fact—besides Smoky leading the way by candlelight to the kitchen—Momdy had just awakened with arthritic pains, and was thinking whether it would hurt more to get up and get aspirin or lie there and ignore them; and Tacey and Lucy had never gone to bed at all, but sat up by candlelight in quiet talk about their lovers and friends and family, about the fate of their brother and the shortcomings and virtues of the sister not present, Lily. Lily’s twins had just awakened, one because he’d wet the bed, and the other because she felt the wetness, and their wakefulness was about to wake Lily. The only one asleep then in the house was Daily Alice, who lay on her stomach with her head deep in two feather pillows, dreaming of a hill where there stood an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace.

La Negra

On a winter day, Sylvie paid a visit to her old neighborhood, where she had not lived since her mother had gone back to the Island and farmed Sylvie out to aunts. In a furnished room down that street, with her mother, her brother, a child of her mother’s, her grandmother and the odd visitor, Sylvie had grown, and grown Somehow the Destiny that she had today brought back with her to these littered streets.

Though only a few subway stops away from Old Law Farm, it seemed a great distance, across a border, another country altogether; so dense was the City that it could contain many such foreign countries cheek by jowl; there were several which Sylvie had never visited at all, their old Dutch or quaintly rural names suggestive and remote to her. But these blocks she knew. Hands in the pockets of her old black fur, double socks on her feet, she went down streets she walked often in her dreams, and they weren’t much different than she dreamed them to be, they were preserved as though in memory: the landmarks by which she had mapped them as a child were mostly still there, the candy store, the evangelical church where women with moustaches and powdered faces sang hymns, the squalid credit grocer, the notaria scary and dark. She found, by following these markers, the building where the woman called La Negra lived; and though it was smaller, dirtier, with darker and more urinous hallways than it had been or than she remembered it, it was the same, and her heart beat fast with apprehension as she tried to remember what door was hers. From out an apartment, as she climbed up, a family argument accompanied by jíbaro music suddenly burst, husband, wife, crying children, mother-in-law. He was drunk, and going out to get drunker; the wife railed at him, the mother-inlaw railed at the wife, the music sang of love. Sylvie asked where La Negra’s house was. They all fell silent, all but the radio, and pointed upward, studying Sylvie. “Thanks,” she said, and went up; behind her the sextet (well and long rehearsed) resumed.

From behind her door studded with locks La Negra questioned Sylvie, unable, apparently, despite her powers, to place her. Then Sylvie remembered that La Negra had known her only by a childhood diminutive, and she gave that. There was a shocked silence (Sylvie could sense it) and the locks were opened.

“I thought you were gone,” the black woman said, eyes wide, mouth corners drawn down in fearful surprise.

“Well, I am,” Sylvie said. “Years ago.”

“I mean far,” La Negra said. “Far, far.”

“No,” Sylvie said. “Not so far.”

She herself was a shock to Sylvie, for she had grown a lot smaller, and a lot less fearsome as she was smaller. Her hair had grown gray as steel wool. But the apartment, when La Negra at last stood aside and let Sylvie enter, was the same: mostly a smell, or many smells together, that brought back, as though she inhaled them with the odors, the fear and wonder she had felt here.

“Tití,” she said, touching the old woman’s arm (for La Negra still stared at her in something like surprise and didn’t speak), “Tití, I need some help.”

“Yes,” La Negra said. “Anything.”

But Sylvie, looking around the small, small apartment, was less sure than she had been an hour ago about what help she wanted. “Gee, the same,” she said. There was the bureau, done up as a composite altar, with the chipped statues of black Santa Barbara and black Martin de Porres, the red candles lit before them, the plastic lace tablecloth beneath; there was the picture of Our Lady pouring blessings that turned to roses into the gas-flame-colored sea. On another wall was the Guardian Angel picture which also hung, oddly, on George Mouse’s kitchen wall: the dangerous bridge, the two children, the potent angel watching to see that they crossed safely. “Who’s that?” Sylvie asked. Between the saints, before the talismanic hand, was a picture shrouded in black silk, a candle before it also, burning low.

“Come sit, come sit,” La Negra said quickly. “She’s not being punished, even if it looks like it. I never meant that.”

Sylvie decided not to question this. “Oh, hey, I brought some stuff.” She offered the bag, some fruit, some dulces, some coffee she had begged from George, who got it when no one else could, for she had remembered her aunt drinking it with relish, hot white and sweet.

La Negra, blessing her profusely, grew easier. When she had, as a precaution, taken the glass of water she kept on the bureau to catch evil spirits in and flushed it down the noisy toilet and replaced it, they made the coffee and talked about old things, Sylvie in her nervousness rattling on a little.

“So I heard from your mother,” La Negra said. “She called long-distance. Not me. But I heard. And your father.”

“He’s not my father,” Sylvie said, dismissively.

“Well…”

“Just somebody my mother married.” She smiled at her aunt. “I got no father.”

“Ay, bendita.”

“A virgin birth,” Sylvie said, “just ask my mother,” and then, though laughing, clapped her hand over her mouth at the blasphemy.

Coffee made, they drank it and ate the dulces, and Sylvie told her aunt why she had come: to get the Destiny that once upon a time La Negra had seen in the cards and in her child’s palm removed from her: to have it pulled, like a tooth.

“See, I met this man,” she said, looking down, suddenly shy to feel the warmth that bloomed in her heart. “And I love him, and…”

“Is he rich?” La Negra asked.

“I don’t know, I think his family is, sort of.”

“Then,” her aunt said, “maybe he’s the Destiny.”

“Ay, tití,” Sylvie said. “He’s not that rich.”

“Well…”

“But I love him,” Sylvie said. “And I don’t want some big Destiny coming along and snatching me away from him.”

“Ay, no,” La Negra said, “but where would it go? If it left you.”

“I don’t know,” Sylvie said. “Couldn’t we just throw it away.

La Negra slowly shook her head, her eyes growing round. Sylvie felt suddenly both afraid and foolish. Wouldn’t it have been easier to simply cease believing that any destiny was hers; or to believe that love was as high a destiny as anyone could want or have, and which she did have? What if messing in it with spells and potions didn’t ward it off at all, but only turned it bitter, and sour, and cost her love as well… “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said. “All I know is that I love him, and that’s enough; I want to be with him, and be good to him, and make him rice and beans and have his babies and… and just go on and on.”

“I’ll do what you ask,” La Negra said in a low voice that didn’t sound like hers. “Whatever you ask.”

Sylvie looked at her, a frisson of blue magic stealing up her spine. The old black woman sat in her chair as though enervated, her eyes not leaving Sylvie but not quite seeing her either. “Well,” Sylvie said doubtfully. “Like the time you came to our house, and put the evil spirits on a coconut, and rolled them out the door? And down the hall and out to the garbage?” She had told this story to Auberon, laughing uproariously over it with him, but here it didn’t seem funny. “Tití?” she said. But her aunt (though sitting in her plastic-covered armchair all the time) was no longer there.

No, the Destiny could not be put on a coconut, it was too heavy; it could not be rubbed away with oils or washed off in herbbaths, it went too deep. La Negra, if she were to do what Sylvie commanded, if her old heart could bear it, would have to draw it from Sylvie and swallow it herself. Where was it, first of all? She approached Sylvie’s heart with careful steps. Most of these doors she knew: love, money, health, children. That portal there, ajar, she didn’t know. “Bueno, bueno,” she said, desperately afraid that when the Destiny she let out of Sylvie rushed upon her it would kill her, or so transform her that she might as well be dead. Her spirit guides, when she turned to look for them, had fled in terror. And yet she must do what Sylvie had commanded. She put her hand on the door, and began to open it, glimpsing a golden daylight beyond, a rush of wind, the murmur of many voices.

“No!” Sylvie shouted. “No, no, no, I was wrong, don’t!”

The portal slammed shut. La Negra, with heart-sickening vertigo, tumbled back into her armchair in her little apartment. Sylvie was shaking her.

“I take it back, I take it back!” Sylvie cried. But it hadn’t ever left her.

La Negra, recovering, patted her heaving breast with her hand. “Don’t ever do that again, child,” she said, weak with relief that Sylvie had done it this time. “You could kill a person.”

“I’m sorry, sorry,” Sylvie said, “but this was all just a big mistake…”

“Rest, rest,” La Negra said, still immobile in the chair, watching Sylvie scramble into her coat. “Rest.” But Sylvie wanted only to get out of this room, where strong currents of brujeria seemed to play around her like lightning; she was desperately sorry she’d even thought of this move and hoping against hope that her foolishness hadn’t wounded her Destiny, or caused it to turn on her, or waked it at all, why hadn’t she just let it sleep where it lay, peaceful, not bothering anybody? Her invaded heart thudded reproachfully, she pulled out her purse with trembling fingers, looking for the wadded bills she had brought to pay for this crazy operation.

La Negra drew away from the money Sylvie offered her as though it might sting her. If Sylvie had offered her gold coins, potent herbs, a medallion heavy with power, a book of secrets, she would have taken them, she had passed the test put to her and deserved something: but not dirty bills for buying groceries, not money passed through a thousand hands.

Out on the street, hurrying away, Sylvie thought: I’m all right, I’m all right; and hoped that it was so. Sure she could have her Destiny removed; she could cut off her nose, too. No, it was with her for good, she was still burdened with it, and if not glad to be then glad anyway that it hadn’t been taken from her; and though she still knew little enough of it she had learned one thing when La Negra had tried to open her, one thing that made her hurry fast away, searching for a train station that would take her downtown: she had learned that whatever her Destiny was, Auberon was in it. And for sure she would not want it at all if he were not.

La Negra rose heavily from her armchair, still baffled. Had that been she? It could not have been, not in the flesh, not unless all of La Negra’s calculations were wrong; yet there on the table lay the fruits she had brought, and the half-eaten dulces.

But if that had been her who had been with La Negra just now, then who was it who had these many years helped La Negra in her prayers and spells? If she was still here, untransmogrified still in the same City La Negra inhabited, then how could she, at La Negra’s invocation, have cured, and told truths, and brought lovers together?

She went to her bureau and drew off the scrap of black silk that covered the central image of her spirit altar. She half-expected it to be gone, but it was there: an old cracked photograph, an apartment much like the one La Negra stood in; a birthday party, and a dark, skinny, pigtailed girl seated (on a thick phone book no doubt) behind her cake, a paper crown on her head, her large eyes compelling and weirdly wise.

Was she so old now, La Negra wondered, that she could no longer tell spirits from flesh, visitors from visitations? And if that were so, what might it portend for her practice?

She lit a fresh candle, and pressed it down into the red glass before the picture.

The Seventh Saint

Long years before, George Mouse had showed the City to Auberon’s father, making him a City man; now Sylvie did the same for Auberon. But this was a changed town. The difficulties that everywhere had been cropping up in even the best laid plans of men, the inexplicable yet Somehow inevitable failure that seemed built into their manifold schemes, were sharpest in the City, and caused the greatest pain and anger there—the fixed anger Smoky hadn’t seen but which Auberon saw in nearly every City face he looked into.

For the City, even more than the nation, lived on Change: rapid, ruthless, always for the better. Change was the lifeblood of the City, the animator of all dreams there, the power that coursed in the veins of the men of the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club, the fire that boiled up wealth and bustle and satisfaction. The City Auberon came to, though, had slowed. The quick eddies of fashion had grown sluggish; the great waves of enterprise had become a still lagoon. The permanent depression that the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club struggled against but was unable to reverse began in this grinding-to-a-halt, this unwonted cumbersome loginess of the greatest City, and spread outward from it in slow ripples of weary exhaustion to benumb the republic. Except in small ways (and that as constantly and pointlessly as ever) the City had stopped changing: the City Smoky knew had changed utterly, had changed by ceasing to change.

Sylvie assembled from the aged pile a city fcr Auberon’s mind’s eye that would anyway have been very different from the one George built for Smoky. A landlord, however odd, and an old, even a charter member (on his grandfather’s side) of the great changer families, George Mouse felt the decline in his beloved Apple, and was sometimes bitter, and sometimes indignant at it. But Sylvie had come from a different strain, from what had been in Smoky’s time the dark underside of a glamorous dream, and was now (though still raddled with violence and desperation) its least depressed enclave. The last cheerful streets of the City were the streets where the people lived who had always been at the changers’ mercy, and who now, in the midst of everyone else’s sense of decline into stagnancy and irremediable mess, lived much as they always had, only with a longer history and a surer tradition: hand-to-mouth, day to day, with a musical accompaniment.

She took him to the clean, crowded apartments of her relatives, where he sat on the plastic coverings of outlandish furniture and was given glasses of iceless soda (not good to chill the blood, they thought) set in saucers, and inedible dulces, and listened to himself praised in Spanish: a good husband, they thought, for Sylvie, and though she objected to the honorific they went on using it for decency’s sake. He was confused by the many and, to his ear, similar-sounding diminutives used among them. Sylvie, for reasons she remembered but he could never keep straight, was called Tati by some members of the family, a branch that included the dark aunt not-really-an-aunt who had read Sylvie’s Destiny, the aunt called La Negra. Tati in some child’s mouth had become Tita, which had also stuck, and which in its turn became (a grand diminutive) Titania. Often enough Auberon didn’t know that the subject of anecdotes told him in hilarious Spanglish was his own beloved under another name.

“They think you’re great,” Sylvie said to him after a visit, out on the street, her hand thrust deep into his overcoat pocket where he held it for warmth.

“Well, they’re very nice too…”

“But papo, I was so embarrassed when you put your feet up on that—esta thing—that coffee-table thing.”

“Oh?”

“That was very bad. Everybody noticed.”

“Well, why the hell didn’t you say something?” he said, embarrassed. “I mean at home we lay all over the furniture, and it was…” He stopped himself from saying And it was real furniture, but she heard it anyway.

“I tried to tell you. I was looking at you. I mean I couldn’t say, Hey take your feet off that. They’d think I treated you like Tití Juana treats Enrico.” Enrico was a henpecked husband, and a laughingstock. “You don’t know what they go through to get that ugly stuff,” she said. “It costs a lot, believe it or not, muebles like that.” They were silent a while, bent into a cruel wind. Muebles, he thought, “movables,” strange formal-sounding language for such a people. She said, “They’re all crazy. I mean some of them are crazy crazy. But they’re all crazy.”

He knew that, for all the great affection she had for her complex family, she was trying desperately to extricate herself from the long, almost Jacobean tragicomedy of their common life, charged as it was with madness, farce, corrosive love, even murder, even ghosts. In the night she would often toss and turn, and cry out in anguish, imagining terrible things that might, or might have already, happened to one or another of that accident-prone crowd; and often, though Auberon dismissed them as night terrors (for nothing—not one thing he knew of—had ever happened in his family’s life that could be called terrible), her imaginings were not far from wrong. She hated it that they were in danger; she hated to be bound to them; her own Destiny shone like a flaring lamp amid their hopeless confusions, always just about to gutter, or be blown out, but still alight.

“I need a coffee,” he said. “Something hot.”

“I need a drink,” she said. “Something strong.”

Like all lovers, they had soon assembled (as on a revolving stage) the places where the scenes of their drama alternately took place: a little Ukrainian diner whose windows were always occluded with steam, where the tea was black and so was the bread; the Folding Bedroom of course; a vast gloomy theater encrusted with Egyptian decoration, where the movies were cheap and changed often and played into the morning; the Nite Owl market; the Seventh Saint Bar & Grill.

The great virtue of the Seventh Saint, besides the price of its drinks and its nearness to Old Law Farm, a train stop away, was its wide front windows, nearly floor to ceiling, in which as in a shadow-box or on a movie screen the life of the street outside passed. The Seventh Saint must once have been somewhat splendid, for this glass wall was tinted a rich, expensive brown, which added a further unreality to the scene, and which darkened the interior like dark glasses. It was like being in Plato’s cave, Auheron told Sylvie, who listened to him lecture on the subject; or rather watched him talk, fascinated by his strangeness and not paying inordinately close attention to the words. She loved to learn, but her mind wandered.

“The spoons?” he said, lifting one up.

“Girls,” she said.

“And the knives and forks are boys,” he said, glimpsing a pattern.

“No, the forks are girls too.”

They had café-royale before them. Outside, hatted and scarved in the deathly cold, people hurried home from jobs, bent before the unseen wind as before an idol or a lofty personage. Sylvie was herself between jobs at the moment (a common dilemma for one with a Destiny as high as hers) and Auberon was living on his advances. They were poor but leisured.

“The table?” he asked. He couldn’t imagine.

“A girl.”

It was no wonder, he thought, that she was so sexy, when all the world was boys and girls to her. In the language she had been born into there were no neuters. In the Latin Auberon had learned, or at least studied, with Smoky, the genders of nouns were an abstraction that he at any rate could never feel; but to Sylvie the world was a constant congress of male and female, boy and girl. The world: that was el mundo, a man; but la terra, the earth, was a woman. That seemed right to Auberon; the world of affairs and notions, the name of a newspaper, the Great World; but mother earth, the fructifying soil, Dame Kind. Such appropriated divisions didn’t extend very far, though: the lank-haired mop was a girl, but so was his bony typewriter.

They played that game for a while, and then commented on the people passing by. Because of the tint of the glass, those passing by outside saw, not the cave’s interior, but themselves reflected; and, not knowing they were observed from inside, sometimes stopped to adjust their clothing, or admire themselves. Sylvie’s strictures on the common run of people were harsher than his; she had a great taste for all eccentricities and oddities, but stern standards of physical beauty and a finely-honed sense of the ridiculous. “Oh, papo, check this one out, check him out… That’s what I meant by a soft-boiled egg, you see what I mean?” And he did see, and she dissolved in her sweet raucous laughter. Without ever knowing he did so, he adopted for life her standards of beauty, could even feel himself drawn to the lean, brown, soft-eyed, strong-wristed men she favored, like Leon the café-crème-colored waiter who had brought their drinks. It was a relief to him when she decided (after long thought) that their children would be beautiful.

The Seventh Saint was preparing for the dinner hour. The bus-boys glanced at their messy table. “You ready?” Auberon said.

“I’m ready,” she said. “Let’s blow this joint.” A phrase of George’s, full of aged double-entendres more reminiscent of wit than exactly funny. They bundled themselves up.

“Train or walk?” he asked. “Train.”

“Hell yes,” she said.

Whispering Gallery

In their rush to the warmth they leapt by mistake onto the express, which (full of sheeplike, sheep-smelling riders bound for the Bronx) didn’t stop before it reached the old Terminus, mixing it up there with twenty other trains bound in all directions.

“Oh hey wait a sec,” she said as they were changing trains. “There’s something here I want to show you. Oh yeah! You gotta see this. Come on!”

They went down along passages and up ramps, the same complex Fred Savage had first threaded him through, though whether in the same direction he had no idea. “What,” he said.

“You’ll love it,” she said. She paused at a turning. “Now if I can only find it… There!”

What she pointed to was an empty space: a vaulted intersection where four corridors met in a cross.

“What,” he said.

“C’mere.” She took him by the shoulders and steered him into a corner of the place, where the ribbed vaulting descended to the floor, making what seemed to be a slot or narrow opening but which was only joined bricks. She faced him into this joint. “Just stand there,” she said, and she went away. He waited, obediently facing into the corner.

Then, startling him profoundly, her voice, distinct yet hollow and ghostly, sounded from directly in front of him: “Hi there.”

“What,” he said, “where…”

“Sh,” her voice said. “Don’t turn around. Talk real soft: whisper.”

“What is it?” he whispered.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But if I stand over here in this corner, and whisper, you can hear me over there. Don’t ask me how.”

Weird! It sounded as though Sylvie were speaking to him from some realm within the corner, through a crack in an impossibly narrow door. A whispering gallery: hadn’t there been some speculation about whispering galleries in the Architecture? Probably. There wasn’t much that book didn’t speculate about.

“Now,” she said. “Tell me a secret.”

He paused a moment. There was a privacy about the corner, the disembodied whispering, that tempted confidences. He felt bared, or barable, though he could see nothing: the opposite of a voyeur. He said: “I love you.”

“Aw,” she said, touched. “But that’s not a secret.”

A new fierce heat flew up his spine and erected his hair as a notion came to him. “Okay,” he said, and told her of a secret desire he’d had but hadn’t dared express to her before.

“Oh, hey, wow,” she said. “You devil.”

He said it again, adding a few details. It was just as though he were whispering the words into her ear in the darkest privacy of bed, but more abstract, more perfectly intimate even than that: right into her mind’s ear. Someone walked past between them; Auberon could hear the footsteps. But the someone couldn’t hear his words: he felt a shiver of glee. He said more.

“Mm,” she said, as at the prospect of great comfort or satisfaction, a small sound that he couldn’t help answering with a sound of his own. “Hey, what are you doing over there,” her whisper said, insinuatingly. “Bad boy.”

“Sylvie,” he whispered. “Let’s go home.”

“Yah.”

They turned away from their corners (each appearing to the other very small and bright and far away after the dark intimacy of their whispers) and came to meet in the center, laughing now, pressing into each other as much as their heavy coats allowed them to, and with many smiles and looks (God, he thought, her eyes are so bright, flashing, deep, full of promise, all those things eyes are in books but never are in life, and she was his) they caught the right train and rode home amid self-absorbed strangers who didn’t notice the two of them, or if they noticed (Auberon thought) knew nothing, nothing of what he knew.

Right Side Up

Sex, he had found out, was really terrific. A terrific thing. Anyway the way Sylvie managed it. In him there had always been a split between the deep desires enchained within him and the cool circumspection which seemed to him required in the adult world he had come to inhabit (he felt, sometimes, by mistake). Strong desire seemed to him childish; childhood (his own, anyway, as far back as he could remember almost, and he could tell stories of others’) was darkly aflame, burdened with heavy passions; adults had passed beyond all that, into affections, into the calmer enjoyments of companionability, into a childlike innocence. Weirdly backward he knew this to be, but it’s how he had felt it. That adult desire, its exigency, its greatness, had been kept a secret from him like all the rest, he didn’t wonder at; he didn’t even bother to feel cheated or enraged at the long deception, since with Sylvie he had learned otherwise, broken the code, turned the thing inside-out so that it was right-side-up, and caught fire.

He hadn’t come to her exactly a virgin, but he may as well have; with no one else had he shared this huge, this necessitous child’s greed, no one had ever lavished hers on him or eaten him up so complacently and with such simple relish. There was no end to it and it was all gratified; if he wanted more (and he discovered in himself astonishing, long-compacted thicknesses of desire to be unfolded) he had more. And what he wanted he was as greedy to give and she as greedy to take. It was all so simple! Not that there were no rules, oh yes there were, they were like the rules of children’s spontaneous games, strictly adhered to but often made up on the spot out of a sudden desire to change the game and please yourself. He remembered Cherry Lake, a dark-browed imperious little girl he had used to play with: she, unlike all the others he played with who said “Let’s pretend,” always used another formula—she said “We must.” We must be bad guys. I must be captured and tied to this tree, and you must rescue me. I must be queen now, and you must be my servant. Must! yes…

Sylvie, it seemed, had always known, had never been in the dark about it all. She told him of certain shames and inhibitions she’d had as a kid where he’d had none, because all that stuff, she knew—kissing, taking off clothes with boys, the rush of feeling—was really for grown-ups, and she would come to it truly only when she was older, and had breasts and high heels and make-up. So there was not in her the division he felt; while he had been told that Mom and Dad had loved each other so much that they had subjected themselves to these childish indignities (so it seemed to him) in order to make babies, and could not connect these reported (and only halfbelieved-in) acts to the huge lashings of feeling invoked in him by Cherry Lake, by certain photographs, by mad games played naked, Sylvie had all along known the real story. Whatever other terrible problems life put before her, and they were many, that one at least she had solved; or rather she had never felt it to be posed. Romance was real, as real as flesh; love and sex were not even woof and warp in it, they were one indissoluble thing, like the seamless fabric of her scented brown skin.

It was he only, then—though in stark numbers she was not more experienced than he—who was astonished, amazed, that this indulgence like a greedy infant’s turned out to be just what grown-ups do, turned out to be adulthood itself: the solemn bliss of strength and capability as well as the mad infant bliss of selfsatisfaction unending. It was manliness, womanliness, certified again and again by the most vivid of seals. Papi she called him in her bliss. Ày Papi yo vengo. Papi! Not daytime papo, but strong nighttime daddy, big as a platano and father of pleasures. He almost skipped to think of it, she pressed to his side, her head just reaching his shoulder; but he kept a steady, long-legged, grown-up pace. Was he right that men sensed his potency as he strode along with her, and deferred to him, was it true that women glanced at him covertly, admiringly? Why didn’t everyone they passed, why didn’t the very bricks and blank white sky bless them?

And so they did: at that moment, as they turned onto the street where Old Law Farm could be entered, between one footfall and another something anyway occurred, something that he thought at first to be within himself, a seizure or a heart attack, but instantly felt all around them: something enormous that was like a sound but wasn’t one, was either a demolition (a whole block of dirty brick and wailpapered interiors gone to powder if it was) or a burst of thunder (breaking the sky at least in two, the sky which remained inexplicably blank winter white above, if it was) or both at once.

They stopped, clutching each other.

“What the hell was that?” Sylvie said.

“I don’t know,” he said. They waited a moment, but no roiling smokes arose from the buildings around them, no sirens wailed, ignited by catastrophe; and still the shoppers and loungers and criminals went their ways, unalarmed, unmoved, their faces filled with private wrongs.

They went on warily to Old Law Farm, holding each other, each feeling that the sudden blow had been meant to separate them (why? how?) and had only barely failed, and might come again at any moment.

What a Tangle

“Tomorrow,” Tacey said, turning her embroidery-frame, “or the next day or the next.”

“Oh,” Lily said. She and Lucy were bent over a crazy-quilt, enriching its surface with different stitcheries, flowers, crosses, bows, esses. “Saturday or Sunday,” Lucy said.

At that moment match was put to touch-hole (perhaps by accident, there would be some trouble about it afterwards) and the thing that Sylvie and Auberon in the City heard or felt rolled over Edgewood, booming the windows, rattling knickknacks on etagères, cracking a china figurine in Violet’s old bedroom and making the sisters duck and raise their shoulders to protect themselves.

“What on earth,” Tacey said. They looked at one another.

“Thunder,” Lily said; “midwinter thunder, or maybe not.”

“A jet plane,” Tacey said, “breaking the sound barrier. Or maybe not.”

“Dynamite,” Lucy said. “Over at the Interstate. Or maybe not.”

They bent to their work again, silent for a while.

“I wonder,” Tacey said, looking up from her frame half turned back-to-front. “Well,” she said, and chose a different thread.

“Don’t,” said Lucy. “That looks funny,” she said critically, of a stitch Lily was making.

“This is a crazy-quilt,” Lily said. Lucy watched her, and scratched her head, not convinced. “Crazy isn’t funny,” she said.

“Crazy and funny.” She worked. “It’s a big zigzag.”

“Cherry Lake,” Tacey said. She held her needle to the wan light of the window, which had ceased to tremble. “Thought she had two boys in love with her. The other day…”

“Was it some Wolf?” Lily asked.

“The other day,” Tacey went on (slipping at the first try a silk thread green as jealousy through the needle’s eye), “the Wolf boy had a terrible fight—with…”

“The rival.”

“A third one; Cherry didn’t even know. In the woods. She is…”

“Three,” Lucy sang, and on the second “three” Lily joined her an octave lower: “Three, three, the rivals; two, two, the lilywhite boys, Clothed all in green-o.”

“She is,” Tacey said, “a cousin of ours, sort of.”

“One is one,” her sisters sang.

“She’ll lose them all,” Tacey said.

“… And all alone, and ever more shall be so.”

“You should use scissors,” Tacey said, seeing Lucy face down on the quilt to bite a thread.

“You should mind your own…”

“Business,” Lily said.

“Beeswax,” Lucy said.

They sang again: Four for the gospel-makers.

“Run off,” Tacey said. “All three.”

“Never to return.”

“Not soon anyway. As good as never.”

“Auberon…”

“Great-grandfather August.”

“Lilac.”

“Lilac.”

The needles they drew through cloth glittered when they pulled them out to the full extension of the thread; each time they pulled them through the threads grew shorter until they were all worked into the fabric, and must be cut, and others slipped through the needles’ eyes. Their voices were so low that a listener would not have known who said what, or whether they talked at all or only murmured meaninglessly.

“What will be fun,” Lily said, “is to see them all again.”

“All come home again.”

“Clothed all in green-o.”

“Will we be there? Will all of us be? Where will it be, how long from now, what part of the wood, what season of the year?”

“We will.”

“Nearly all.”

“There, soon, not a lifetime, every part, midsummer.”

“What a tangle,” Tacey said, and held up for them to see a handful of stuff from her workbox, which a child or a cat had got into: silk thread bright as blood, and black cotton darning-stuff, a hank of sheep-colored wool, a silkpin or two, and a bit of sequined fabric dangling from it all, spinning on a thread-end like a descending spider.

Hawksquill could not at first determine whether by the operations of her Art she had cast herself into the bowels of the earth, the bottom of the sea, the heart of the fire or the middle of the air. Russell Eigenblick would later tell her that he had often suffered from the same confusion in his long sleep, and that perhaps it was in all four places that he had been hidden, in all four corners of the earth. The old legend always put him in the mountain, of course, but Godfrey of Viterbo said no, the sea; the Sicilians had him ensconced in the fires of Etna, and Dante put him in Paradise or its environs though he might just as well (if he had been feeling vindictive) have stuck him in the Inferno with his grandson.

The Top of a Stair

Since taking this assignment, Hawksquill had gone far, though never quite this far, and little of what she had begun to suspect about Russell Eigenblick could be put into a form understandable to the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club, which almost daily now importuned her for a decision concerning the Lecturer. His power and appeal had grown enormously, and soon it would be impossible for them to dispose of Eigenblick tidily, if dispose of him they must; not much longer and it would be impossible to dispose of him at all. They raised Hawksquill’s fees, and spoke in veiled terms of perhaps seeking other sources of advice. Hawksquill ignored all this. So far from malingering, she now spent nearly every waking and many sleeping hours in pursuit of whoever or whatever it was that claimed to be Russell Eigenblick, haunting her own memory mansions like an unlaid ghost, and following flying scraps of evidence farther than she had ever gone before, pulling up at times before powers she would rather not have started into wakefulness, and finding herself in places that she had not before known she knew existed.

Where she found herself just now was at the top of a stair.

Whether she mounted or descended these stairs she wouldn’t afterwards be able to determine; but they were long. At the end of them was a chamber. The broad studded door stood flung open. A great stone, by its track in the dust, had not long ago been rolled away from barring shut the door. Dimly within she could see a long feast-table, spilled cups and scattered chairs iced with ancient dust; from the chamber came an odor as of a messy bedroom just opened. But there was no one within.

She made to pass the broken door to investigate, but noticed then seated on the stone a figure in white, small, pretty, head bound in a golden fillet, paring its nails with a small knife. Not knowing what language to speak to this person, Hawksquill raised her brows and pointed within.

“He is not here,” the person said. “He is risen.”

Hawksquill considered a question or two, but understood before she asked that this personage would not answer them, that he (or she) was an embodiment only of that one remark: He is not here, he is risen. She turned away (the stair and the door and the message and the messenger fading from her attention like a shape momentarily perceived in changeful clouds) and set off further, bethinking herself where she might go for answers to many new questions, or questions to fit the many new answers she was quickly garnering.

Daughter of Time

“The difference,” Hawksquill had long ago written in one of the tall marbled folios filled with her left-handed script which stood or lay on the long lamplit study table far behind her now, “the difference between the Ancient concept of the nature of the world and the New concept is, in the Ancient concept the world has a framework of Time, and in the New concept, a framework of Space.

“To look at the Ancient concept through the spectacles of the New concept is to see absurdity: seas that never were, worlds claimed to have fallen to pieces and been created newly, a congeries of unlocatable Trees, Islands, Mountains and Maelstroms. But the Ancients were not fools with a poor sense of direction; it was only not Orbis Terrae that they were looking at. When they spoke of the four corners of the earth, they meant of course no four physical places; they meant four repeated situations of the world, equidistant in time from one another: they meant the solstices and the equinoxes. When they spoke of seven spheres, they did not mean (until Ptolemy foolishly tried to take their portrait) seven spheres in space; they meant those circles described in Time by the motions of the stars: Time, that roomy seven-storey mountain where Dante’s sinners wait for Eternity. When Plato tells of a river girdling the earth, which is somewhere (so the New concept would have it) up in the air and somewhere also in the middle of the earth, he means by that river the same river Heraclitus could never step in twice. Just as a lamp waved in darkness creates a figure of light in the air, which remains for as long as the lamp repeats its motion exactly, so the universe retains its shape by repetition: the universe is Time’s body. And how will we perceive this body, and how operate on it? Not by the means we perceive extension, relation, color, form—the qualities of Space. Not by measurement and exploration. No: but by the means we perceive duration and repetition and change: by Memory.”

Knowing this to be so, it could not matter to Hawksquill that on her travels her gray-bunned head and nerveless limbs did not probably change place, remained (she supposed) in the plush chair in the middle of the Cosmo-Opticon at the top of her house which stood in a hexagram of lower City streets. The winged horse she had summoned to bear her away was not a winged horse but that Great Square of stars pictured above her, and “away” was not where she was borne; but the greatest skill (perhaps the only skill) of the true mage is to apprehend these distinctions without making them, and to translate time into space without an error. It’s all, said the old alchemists quite truthfully, so simple.

“Away!” said the voice of her Memory when the hand of her Memory was on the reins again and her seat was sure, and away they went, vast wings beating through Time. They traversed oceans of it while Hawksquill thought; and then her steed plunged, at her command, unhesitatingly, without a blink, which took the breath of her Memory away, into either the southern sky below the world or into the limpid-dark austral waters, in any case making for there where all past ages lie, Ogygia the Fair.

Her Steed’s silver-shod feet touched that shore, and his great head sank; his strong wings, billowing like draperies, now emptied of the air of time, sank too with a whisper and trailed along the eternal grass, which he cropped for strength. Hawksquill dismounted, patted her steed’s enormous neck, whispered that she would return, and started off, following the footprints, each longer than herself, pressed on these shores at the end of the Golden Age and petrified long since. The air was windless, yet the gigantic forest under whose eaves she entered soughed with a breath of its own, or perhaps with His breath, expelled and drawn with the long regularity of immemorial sleep.

She came no closer than the entrance of the vale he filled. “Father,” she said, and her voice startled the silence; aged eagles with heavy wings rose up and settled sleepily again. “Father,” she said again, and the vale stirred. The great gray boulders were his knees, the long gray ivy his hair, the precipice-gripping rnassy roots his fingers; the eye he opened to her was milky-gray, a dim-glowing stone, the Saturn of her Cosmo-Opticon. He yawned: the inhalation turned the leaves of trees like storm-wind and stirred her hair, and when he exhaled his breath was the cold black breath of a bottomless cave.

“Daughter,” he said, in a voice like earth’s.

“I’m sorry to disturb your sleep, Father,” she said, “but I have a question only you can answer.”

“Ask it then.”

“Does a new world now begin? I see no reason why it should, and yet it seems it does.”

Everyone knows that when his sons overthrew their ancient Father, and cast him here, the endless Age of Gold ended, and Time was invented with all its labors. Less well known is how the young, unruly Gods, frightened or ashamed at what they had done, gave the ruling of this new entity into the hands of their Father. He was asleep in Ogygia then and didn’t care, so ever since it has been here in this isle, where the five rivers have their common wellspring, that all the used years accumulate like fallen leaves; and when the Ancientest One, troubled by a dream of overthrow or change, shifts his massy limbs and smacks his lips, scratching at the rock-ribbed muscles of his hams, a new age issues, the measures alter which he gives to the dance of the universe, the sun is born in a new sign.

Thus the airy scheming Gods contrived to put the blame for the calamity on their old Father. In time, Kronos, king of the happy Timeless Age, became old busybody Chronos with his sickle and hourglass, father of chronicles and chronometers. Only his true sons and daughters know better—and some adopted ones, Ariel Hawksquill among them.

“Does a new age now begin?” she asked again. “It’s beforehand if it does.”

“A New Age,” said Father Time in a voice that could create one. “No. Not for years and years.” He brushed away a few of these that had gathered in withered piles on his shoulders.

“Then,” Hawksquill said, “who is Russell Eigenblick, if he isn’t King of a new age?”

“Russell Eigenblick?”

“The man with the red beard. The Lecturer. The Geography.”

He lay back again, his rocky couch groaning beneath him. “No King of a new age,” he said. “An upstart. An invader.”

“Invader?”

“He is their champion. That’s why they waked him.” His milky-gray eye was drifting closed. “Asleep for a thousand years, lucky man. And now awakened for the conflict.”

“Conflict? Champion?”

“Daughter,” he said. “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

War… There had been, all along, one word she had sought for, one word under which all the disorderly facts, all the oddities she had gathered up concerning Russell Eigenblick and the random disturbances he seemed to cause in the world might be subsumed. She had that word now: it blew through her consciousness like a wind, uprooting structures and harrying birds, tearing leaves from trees and laundry from lines, but at least, at last, blowing from one direction only. War: universal, millennial, unconditional War. For God’s sake, she thought, he’d said as much himself in every recent Lecture; she’d always thought it was merely a metaphor. Merely! “I didn’t know, Father,” she said, “until this moment.”

“Nothing to do with me,” said the Ancientest One, his words muffled in a yawn. “They applied to me once for his sleep, and I granted it. A thousand years ago, give or take a century… They are after all children of my children, related by marriage… I do them a favor once and again. No harm in that. Little enough to do here anyway.”

“Who are they, Father?”

“Mm.” His enormous vacant eye was shut.

“Who are they whose champion he is?”

But the vast head was bent backward on its bouldered pillow, the vast throat swallowed a snore. The hoary-headed eagles who had risen shrieking when he woke settled again on their crags. The windless forest soughed. Hawksquill, reluctantly, turned her steps toward the shore again. Her steed (sleepy himself, even he) raised his head at her approach. Well! No help for it. Thought must conquer this, Thought could! “No rest for the weary,” she said, and leapt smartly onto his broad back. “On! And quickly! Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

She thought as they ascended, or descended: who slept for a thousand years? What children of the children of Time would make war on men, to what end, with what hope of success?

And who (by the way) was that golden-haired child she had glimpsed curled up asleep in the lap of Father Time?

The Child Turned

The child turned, dreaming; dreaming of what had come of all she had seen on her last day awake, dreaming it all and altering it in her dreaming even as, elsewhere, it came to pass; plucking apart her bright and dark dream-tapestry and knitting it up again with the same threads in a way she liked better. She dreamt of her mother awaking and saying “What?”, of one of her fathers on a path at Edgewood; she dreamt of Auberon, in love somewhere with a dream-Lilac of his own invention; she dreamt of armies made of cloud, led by a red-bearded man who startled her nearly awake. She dreamt, turning, lips parted, heart beating slowly, that at the end of her tour she came riding down from the air, came coursing with vertiginous speed along an iron-gray and oily river.

The ghastly red round sun was sinking vaporously amid the elaborate smokes and scorings of jets that had made the false armies in the west. Lilac could only hold her tongue: the brutal esplanades, the stained blocks of buildings, the clamor brought to her ears, silenced her. The stork turned inward; Mrs. Underhill’s stick seemed uncertain in the rectangular valleys; they went east, then south. A thousand people seen from above are not as one or two: a heaving queasy sea of hair and hats, the odd bright muffler blown back. Hell-holes in the street shot up steam; crowds were swallowed up in clouds of it, and (so it seemed to Lilac) didn’t emerge, but there were countless others to replace them.

“Remember these markers, child,” Mrs. Underhill shouted back at Lilac over the keening sirens and the turmoil. “That burned church. Those railings, like arrows. That fine house. You’ll pass this way again, alone.” A caped figure just then detached itself from the crowd and made to enter the fine house, which didn’t seem fine to Lilac. The stork, at Mrs. Underhill’s direction, topped the house, cupped her wings to stop, and with a grunt of relief put her red feet down amid the weather-obscured detritus of the rooftop. The three of them looked down into the middle of the block just as the caped figure came out the back door.

“Now mark him, dear,” Mrs. Underhill said. “Who do you suppose he is?”

With arms akimbo beneath the cloak, and a wide hat on his head, he was a dark lump to Lilac. Then he took off the hat, and shook out long black hair. He turned clockwise in a circle, nodding, and looked around at the rooftops, a white grin on his dark face. “Another cousin,” Lilac said.

“Well, yes, and who else?”

He put his finger thoughtfully to his lips, and scuffed the dirt of the untidy garden. “I give up,” Lilac said.

“Why, your other father!”

“Oh.”

“The one who engendered you. Who’ll need your help, as much as the other.”

“Oh.”

“Planning improvements,” Mrs. Underhill said with satisfaction, “just now.”

George paced out his garden. He went and chinned himself on the board fence which separated his yard from the next building’s, and looked over like Kilroy into the even less well-kept garden there. He said aloud, “God damn! All right!” He let himself down, and rubbed his hands together.

Lilac laughed as the stork stepped to the roof’s ledge to take off. Like the stork’s white wings opening, George’s black cape flew outward and then closed more tightly around him as he laughed too. This, Lilac decided, delighted by something about him which she couldn’t name, was the father which, of the two of them, she would have chosen to have: and with the instant certainty of a solitary child about who is and who is not on its side, she chose him now.

“There’s no choosing, though,” said Mrs. Underhill as they ascended. “Only Duty.”

“A present for him!” she cried to Mrs. Underhill. “A present!”

Mrs. Underhill said nothing—the child had been indulged quite enough—but as they coursed down the shabby street, in their wake there sprang up from the sidewalk at even intervals a row of skinny and winter-naked saplings, one by one. This street is ours, anyway, thought Mrs. Underhill, or as good as; and what’s a farm without a row of guardian trees along the road that passes it?

“Now for the door!” she said, and the cold city tumbled beneath them as they fled uptown. “It’s long past your bedtime— there!” She pointed ahead to an aged building that must once have been tall, overweening even, but no more. It had been built of white stone, white no longer, carved into a myriad of faces, caryatids, birds and beasts, all coal-miners now and weeping filthily. The central part of it was set back from the street; wings on either side framed a dark dank courtyard into which taxis and people disappeared. The wings were linked, high up at the top, by an archlike course of masonry, an arch for a giant to pass under: and they three did pass under it, the stork ceasing to beat its wings, coasting, wing-tipping slightly to arrow accurately into the darkness of the courtyard. Mrs. Underhill cried “ ’Ware heads! Duck, duck!” and Lilac, feeling a whoosh of stale air rush up at her from the interior, ducked. She closed her eyes. She heard Mrs. Underhill say, “Nearly done now, old girl, nearly done; you know the door,” and the darkness behind her lids grew brighter, and the noise of the City vanished, and they were elsewhere again.

So she dreamed; so it came to have been; so the saplings grew, dirty-faced urchins, tough, neglected and sharp. They grew, fattening in the trunk, buckling the sidewalk that ran beneath them. They wore broken kites and candy-wrappers, burst balloons and sparrows’ nests in their hair, unmindful; they shouldered each other for a glimpse of sun, they shook their sooty snow winter after winter on passersby. They grew, penknife-scarred, snaggle-branched, dog-manured, unkillable. On a mild night in a certain March, Sylvie, returning to Old Law Farm at dawn, looked up at their branches outlined against a raw pale sky and saw that every twig-tip bore a heavy bud.

She said goodnight to the one who had seen her home, though he was importunate, and sought the four keys she needed to get herself into Old Law Farm and the Folding Bedroom. He’ll never believe this crazy story, she thought laughing, never believe the crazy but essentially innocent, nearly innocent, chain of events that had had her up till dawn. Not that he would grill her; he’d only be glad she was safe, she wished he wouldn’t worry. She got whirled away, sometimes, is all; everybody put a claim in on her, and most of them seemed to her good. It was a big city, and its revels ran till late when the moon was full in March, and hey, one thing just led to another… She unlocked the door into the Farm, and made her way up through the sleeping warren of it; at the hall that led to the Folding Bedroom she slipped off the high-heeled shoes from her dancing feet and tiptoed to the door. She unlocked the locks quietly as a burglar, and peeked in. Auberon lay in a heap on the bed, obscure in the dawn light and (for some reason she was sure) only feigning untroubled sleep.

An Imaginary Study

The Folding Bedroom and its little kitchen were so small that Auberon, in order to have some quiet and isolation in which to work, had to create out of it an imaginary study.

“A what?” Sylvie asked.

“An imaginary study,” he said. “Okay. Look. This chair.” He had found somewhere in the ruined habitations of Old Law Farm an old schoolhouse chair with one broad paddle arm for a student to use as a desk. Underneath the seat was a compartment for the student’s books and papers. “Now,” he said. He positioned the chair carefully. “Let’s pretend I have a study in this bedroom. This chair is in it. Now really all we have is this chair, but…”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well will you please just listen a minute?” Auberon said, blazing up. “It’s very simple. There were lots of imaginary rooms at Edgewood where I grew up.”

“I bet.” She stood arms akimbo, a wooden spoon in one hand, head bound in a bright hussy kerchief beneath which her earrings trembled amid escaping curls of raven hair.

“The idea is,” Auberon said, “that when I say ‘I’m going into my study, babe,’ and then sit down in this chair, then it’s as though I’ve gone into a separate room. I shut the door. Then I’m alone in there. You can’t see me or hear me, because the door is closed. And I can’t see or hear you. Get it?”

“Well, okay. But how come?”

“Because the imaginary door is closed, and…”

“No, I mean how come you need this imaginary study? Why don’t you just sit there?”

“I’d rather be in private. You see, we have to make a deal, that whatever I do in my imaginary study is invisible to you; you can’t comment on it or dwell on it or…”

“Gee. What are you going to do?” A smile, and she made a rude gesture with the spoon. “Hey.” But what he intended to do, though no less private and self-indulgent, was mostly to daydream, though he wouldn’t have put it that way; to court, on long woolgathering rambles, Psyche his soul; put two and two together, and perhaps write down the sum, for he would have sharpened pencils in the pencil-well of the desk and a clean pad before him. But mostly, he knew, he would only sit, twist a lock of hair between his fingers, suck his teeth, scratch himself, try to catch the flying speckles that swam in his vision, mutter the same half-line of someone else’s verse over and over and generally behave like the quieter sort of nut. He might also read the papers.

“Thinkin’ and readin’ and writin’, huh,” Sylvie said with great affection.

“Yes. You see, I have to be alone sometimes…”

She was stroking his cheek. “For thinkin’ and readin’ and writin’. Yes, baby. Okay.” She backed away, watching him with interest.

“I’m going into my study now,” Auberon said, feeling foolish.

“Okay. ’Bye.”

“I’m shutting the door.”

She waved the spoon. She began to say something further, but he cast his eyes upward, and she returned to the kitchen.

In his study, Auberon rested his cheek in the cup of his hand and stared at the old grainy surface of his desk. Someone had scratched an obscenity there, and someone else had priggishly altered it into BOOK in block letters. Probably all done with the point of a compass. Compass and protractor. When he started in at his father’s little school his grandfather gave him his old pencil-case, leather with a snap closure and weird Mexican designs cut in it—a naked woman was one, you could run your finger over her stylized breast and feel the leather button of her nipple. There were pencils with dowdy pink hats for erasers, which pulled off to reveal the naked pencil end; there was another rhomboid dialectical gray eraser, half for pencil and a grittier half for ink, which macerated the paper it was used on. Pens black and cork-tipped like Aunt Cloud’s cigarettes, and a steel box of points. And a compass and protractor. Bisect an angle. But never trisect it. With his fingers he moved an imaginary compass above the desk-top. When the little yellow pencil wore down, the compass leaned at a useless angle. He could write a story about those long afternoons in school, in May, say the last day, hollyhocks growing outside and vines clambering in at the open windows; the smell of the outhouse. The pencil box. Mother Westwind and the Little Breezes. Those protracted afternoons… He could call the story Protractor. “Protractor,” he said aloud, and then shot a glance at Sylvie to see if she had overheard him. He caught her just having shot him a glance, and now looking back at her task unconcernedly.

Protractor, protractor… He drummed his fingers on the oak. What was she up to in there anyway? Making coffee? She had heated a big kettle of water, and now dumped heedlessly into it several big shakes of coffee, right from the bag, and threw in this morning’s used grounds as well. A rich, boiling-coffee smell filled the air.

“You know what you ought to do?” she said, stirring the pot. “You ought to try to get a job writing on ‘A World Elsewhere.’ It’s really degenerating.”

“I…” he began to say, but then studiously turned away.

“Oops, oops,” she said, stifling a laugh.

George had said that all that TV was written on the other coast. But how would he know anyway? The real difficulty was that he had come to see, through Sylvie’s elaborate retellings of the events of “A World Elsewhere,” that he could never have thought up the myriad and (to him) incongruous passions that seemed to fill it. Yet for all he knew the terrible griefs, great sufferings, accidents and windfalls it told of were all true to life—what did he know about life, about people? Maybe most people were as wilful, as overmastered by ambition, blood, lust, money, passion as the TV showed them. People and life weren’t his strengths as a writer anyway. His strengths as a writer were…

“Knock-knock,” Sylvie said, standing before him.

“Yes?”

“Can I come in?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where my white outfit is?”

“In the closet?”

She opened the door of the toilet. They had screwed into the door of this little chamber a collapsing clothes-rack, which held most of their clothes. “Look inside my overcoat,” he said.

There it was, a two-piece white cotton outfit, jacket and skirt, an old nurse’s uniform in fact with an identifying patch on the shoulder. Sylvie had ingeniously altered it into something at once stylish and improvised: her taste was sure, her skills didn’t match it quite, he wished not for the first time that he could give her thousands to lavish on herself, it would be a joy to watch.

She looked over the outfit critically.

“Your coffee’s going to boil away,” he said.

“Huh?” With a pair of tiny scissors in the shape of a long-beaked bird she was removing the identifying shoulder patch. “Oh, yike!” She hurried to turn it down. Then she returned to her outfit. Auberon returned to his study.

His strengths as a writer were…

“I wish I could write,” Sylvie said.

“Maybe you can,” Auberon said. “I bet you’d be good at it. No, really”—she had snorted in contempt at this notion—“I bet you would.” He knew with love’s certainty that there was little she couldn’t do, and that little wasn’t worth doing. “What would you write?”

“I bet I could think up better stuff than they think up on ‘A World Elsewhere.’” She carried the steaming kettle of coffee to the tub (as in all old-law tenements this sat squat and unembarrassed in the middle of the kitchen) and began straining the liquid through a cloth into an even bigger cauldron set in the tub. “It’s not touching, y’know? It doesn’t touch your heart.” She started to undress.

“Do you mind,” Auberon said, abandoning as hopeless the imaginary walls and door that separated him from Sylvie, “if I ask you what the hell you’re doing?”

“I’m dying,” she said calmly. Shirtless now, the globes of her breasts swinging gently with their pendular momentum as she moved, she picked up the two parts of the white outfit, looked them over a final time, and thrust them into the cauldron of coffee. Auberon got it, and laughed delightedly.

“Sort of a beige,” Sylvie said, pronouncing the “g” as though it were in “badge”. She plucked from the dish-drainer by the sink the little sock-like cotton strainer—el colador, a boy—which she used to make strong Spanish coffee, and showed it to him. It had turned a rich tan color he had himself often admired. She began stirring the cauldron slowly with a long-handled spoon. “Two shades lighter than me,” she said, “is what I want. Café-con-leche.”

“Pretty,” he said. Coffee spattered her brown skin. She wiped it off and licked her fingers. With the spoon in both hands she lifted the garment up, her breasts tautening, and looked at it; it was already deep brown, browner than she, but rinsings (he could see her think it) would lighten it. She dropped it back in, with a quick finger tucked a lock of hair that had got away back under her snood, and stirred again. Auberon wouldn’t ever decide whether he loved her more when her attention was on him, or when as now it was fixed on some task or thing in the real world. He couldn’t write a story about her: it would consist only of catalogues of her actions, down to the most minute. But he had no real desire to write of anything else. He was standing now in the door of the little kitchen.

“Here’s an idea,” he said. “Those soap-operas always need writers.” He said this as though it were a fact he was sure of. “We could collaborate.”

“Huh?”

“You think up some stuff that might happen on the show—coming out of what’s happening now—only better than what they’ll do—and I can write it.”

“Really?” she said, doubtful but intrigued.

“I mean I’ll write the words, and you write the story.” What was odd (he came closer) was that he meant by this offer to seduce her. He wondered how long lovers are lovers before they stop having to plot each other’s seduction. Never? Perhaps never. Perhaps the lures get smaller, more perfunctory. Or maybe just the reverse. What did he know?

“Okay,” she said with quick decision. “But,” she said with a secret smile, “I might not have a lot of time, because I’m going to get a job.”

“Hey, terrific.”

“Yeah. That’s what this outfit’s for, if it comes out.”

“Gee, that’s great. What kind of job?”

“Well, I didn’t want to tell you since it’s not for sure. I have to get interviewed. It’s in the movies.” She laughed at the absurdity of it.

“A star?”

“Not right away. Not the first day. Later for that.” She moved the sodden brown mess to a corner of the tub. She poured out the cold coffee. “A producer, sort of, I met. Sort of a producer or director. He needs an assistant. But not like a secretary exactly.”

“Oh yeah?” Where was she meeting producers and directors and not telling him about it?

“Like sort of a script girl and assistant.”

“Hm.” Surely Sylvie, even more alert than he was to such things, would have sensed whether this sort-of producer’s offer was real or mere predation; it sounded doubtful to him, but he made encouraging noises.

“So,” she said—turning cold water full force over the now-tan outfit, “I got to look good or at least as good as I can look, to go see him…”

“You always look good.”

“No, really.”

“You look good to me now.”

She flashed him the briefest and brightest of her smiles. “So we’ll get famous together.”

“Sure,” he said, coming closer. “And rich. And you’ll know all about movies, and we’ll make a team.” He circled her. “Let’s make a team.”

“Oh. I got to finish this.”

Okay.

“It’ll be a while.”

“I can wait. I’ll just watch.”

“Oh, papo. I get embarrassed.”

“Mm. That’s nice.” He kissed her throat, smelling the biscuity odor of her exertion, and she allowed him to, her wet hands held out over the tub. “I’m going to let down the bed,” he said in a low voice, something between a threat and the promise of a treat.

“Mm.” She watched him do so, her hands in the water but her mind not now on her task. The bed, lowered, intruded suddenly into the room, very bedlike but also like the prow of a laden ship that had just come in: had just sailed through the far wall and hove to there, waiting to be boarded.

Nevertheless Spring

In the end, though—whether because she came to doubt that her producer really was one, or because the false spring of that week vanished and March went out like a lion freezing her tender marrow, or because the dyed outfit didn’t ever please her quite (there lingered about it after no matter how many washings a faint smell of stale coffee)—Sylvie never did go to be interviewed for the movies. Auberon encouraged her, bought her a book to read on the subject, but this only seemed to plunge her into further gloom. The klieglit visions faded. She sank into a torpor that alarmed Auberon. She lay till late in a huge tangle of bedclothes, his winter coat atop them all, and when she did rise, mooned around the little apartment with a sweatshirt over her nightgown and thick socks on her feet. She’d open the refrigerator and stare irritatedly within at a container of moldy yogurt, nameless leftovers in tinfoil, a flat soda.

“Coño,” she said. “There’s never anything in here.”

“Yeah? Is that so,” he said with heavy irony from within the imaginary study. “I guess it must be broken.” He rose, and reached for his coat. “What do you want?” he said. “I’ll go get something.”

“No, papo…”

“I have to eat too, you know. And if the refrigerator won’t supply it.”

“Okay. Something good.”

“Well what? I could get some cereal…”

She made a face. “Something good,” she said, with a twohanded, chin-uplifted gesture that certainly expressed her desire, but left him no wiser. He went out into a new-fallen still-falling snow.

As soon as she closed the door on him, Sylvie was swept by a tide of gloomy feeling.

It amazed her that he, brought up the baby boy in a household of sisters and aunts, could be so endlessly solicitous, take so much of their daily domestic life on himself, and bitch so little. White people were strange. Among her relatives and their neighbors a husband’s chief domestic duties were eating, beating, and playing dominoes. Auberon was so good. So understanding. And smart: official forms and the endless paper of an aged and paralytic welfare state held no terror for him. And not jealous. When early on she’d developed a pressing crush on sweet brown Leon who waited at the Seventh Saint, and indulged it a while, and lain then next to Auberon every night rigid with guilt and fear till he’d wormed the secret out of her, he’d only said he didn’t care what she did with others as long as she was happy with him when she was with him: now how many guys could you find, she asked herself in the clouded mirror over the sink, who would act like that?

So good. So kind. And how did she repay him? Look at you, she insisted. Bags under your eyes. Losing pounds every day, pretty soon—she held up a warning pinkie in the mirror—like this. Flacca. And not bringing home shit, useless to herself as to him, un’ boba.

She’d work. She’d work hard and pay him back everything he’d done for her, the whole oppressive relentless treasure of his goodness. Toss it back in his face. There. “I’ll wash fuckin’ dishes,” she said aloud, turning away from the small pile of them by the squalid sink, “I’ll turn tricks…”

And was it to that that her Destiny led her? Bitter-faced and rubbing her horripilated arms, she paced from bed to stove like a caged thing. What should free her bound her, bound her to await it amid a poverty, an impoverished day-to-day existence different from the long, hopeless poverty of her growing up, but poverty nonetheless. Sick of it, sick sick sick! Self-pitying tears sprang to her eyes. Damn her Destiny anyway, why couldn’t she trade it for a little decency, a little freedom, a little fun? If she couldn’t throw it away, why could she get nothing in exchange for it either?

She climbed back into bed, black resolution in her mind. She drew up the covers, staring accusatorily at the middle distance. Dark, asleep, far-off but built into her very stuff, her Destiny couldn’t be resigned, she’d learned that. But she was tired of waiting. It had not one single feature she could determine, except that Auberon was in it (but not this squalor; Somehow, not even this Auberon), but she’d discover it now. Now. “Bueno,” she said, “All right,” and took a stem attitude under the covers with arms crossed. She’d wait no more. She’d learn her Destiny and begin it or die; she’d drag it out of the future where it lay by main strength.

Auberon meanwhile plodded to the Nite Owl market (surprised to find this was Sunday and nothing else open, what do weekends mean to the leisured poor?) through snow that lay just for this hour virginal and new, his the first feet to begin its long defilement into rotten slush more black than white. He was angry. In fact he was furious, though he had kissed Sylvie gently farewell, and would kiss her again in ten minutes when he got back, just as gently. Why didn’t she ever even acknowledge the equability of his temper, the sunniness of his disposition? Did she think it was easy to maintain, easy to press down honest indignation into a soft answer, every time, every single time? And what credit did he get for his efforts? He could sock her sometimes. He’d like to give her one good punch, quiet her down a little, show her just how far his patience had been tried. Oh God how awful even to think it.

Happiness, he had come to see, his happiness anyway, was a season; and in that season, Sylvie was the weather. Everyone within him talked about it, among themselves, but no one could do anything about it, they could only wait till it changed. The season of his happiness was spring, a long, skittish, changeful spring, as often withdrawn as proffered—like any spring: but nevertheless spring. He was sure of it. He kicked the wet snow. Sure.

He mooched indecisively among the few and expensive goods the Nite Owl offered—one of those places that keep up a marginal existence by being open on Sundays and deep into the night—and when he had made his choices (two kinds of exotic juices for Sylvie’s tropical palate, to make up for punching her) he drew out his wallet and found it empty. As in the antique joke, a moth should lazily fly out. He scrabbled in his pockets, inside, outside, under the eyes (reserving terrible judgment) of the counterman, and at last, though having to resign one of the juices, made up the amount in found silver and linty pennies.

“Now what?” he said when, snow on his hat and shoulders, he opened the door of the Folding Bedroom and found Sylvie in bed. “Having a little nap?”

“Leamee alone,” she said. “I’m thinking.”

“Thinking, huh.” He took his sodden paper bag into the kitchen and messed around for a time with soup and crackers, but when he offered her these she refused them; in fact for the rest of that day he could hardly get a word out of her, and grew afraid, thinking of her familial streak of madness. Dulcet, kind, he spoke to her, and her retreating soul fled from his words as from a cutting edge.

So he only sat (his imaginary study moved into the kitchen since the bed remained opened and occupied) and thought of how further to indulge her, and of ingratitude; and she struggled on the bed, and sometimes slept. Winter deepened. Black clouds formed over their heads; lightnings answered lightnings; north winds blew; cold rain poured down.

Let Him Follow Love

“Hold hard,” Mrs. Underhill said, “hold hard. Somewhere here a slip’s been made, a turning missed. Don’t you feel that?”

“We do,” said the others gathered there.

“Winter came,” Mrs. Underhill said, “and that was right; and then…”

“Spring!” they all shouted.

“Too fast, too fast.” She beat her temple with her knuckles. A dropped stitch could be fixed, if it could be found; a certain unraveling was in her power; but where along the long, long way had it been? Or—she cast her eye along the vast length of Tale unfolding from the to-come with the steady grace of a jewelled and purposeful serpent—was it yet to be? “Help me, children,” she said.

“We will,” they said, in all their various voices.

This was the problem: if what had to be discovered lay in what-was-to-be, then they could discover that easily enough. It was what-had-been that was hard to keep in mind. That’s the way it is for beings who are immortal or nearly so; they know the future, but the past is dark to them; beyond the present year is the door into aeons-ago, a darkling span lit with solemn lights. As Sophie with her cards probed an unfamiliar future, pressing on the thin membrane that separated her from it, pressing here and there to feel the advancing shapes of things to come, so Mrs. Underhill felt blindly among the things that had been, searching for the shape of what was wrong. “There was an only son,” she said.

“An only son,” they echoed, thinking hard.

“And he came to the City.”

“And he came to the City,” they said.

“And there he sits,” Mr. Woods put in.

“That’s it, isn’t it,” Mrs. Underhill said. “There he sits.”

“Won’t be moved, won’t do his duty, wants to die of love instead.” Mr. Woods clutched his skinny knee in his long hands. “It could be this winter will go on, and never stop.”

“Never stop,” Mrs. Underhill said. A tear was in her eye. “Yes, yes, that’s just how it appears.”

“No, no,” they all said, seeing it so. The freezing rain beat on the deep small windows, crying in mourning, the trees lashed their branches at the implacable wind, the Meadow Mouse was seized in the Red Fox’s desperate jaws. “Think, think,” they said.

She knocked again at her temple, but no one answered. She rose, and they retreated. “I’ll need advice,” she said, “that’s all.”

The black water of the mountain pooi was just unfrozen, though jags of ice like broken stone projected around its margins; on one of these projections Mrs. Underhill stood and sent down her summons.

Sleepy, stupid, too cold even to be angry, Grandfather Trout rose from the dark depths.

“Leamee alone,” he said.

“Answer up,” Mrs. Underhill said sharply, “or it’ll go hard with you.”

“What,” he said.

“This child in the City,” Mrs. Underhill said. “Greatgrandson of yours. Won’t be moved, won’t do his duty, wants to die of love instead.”

“Love,” Grandfather Trout said. “There is no force on earth left stronger than love.”

“He won’t follow the others.”

“Then let him follow love.”

“Hm,” said Mrs. Underhill, and then “hmmm.” She put her thumb to her chin and her finger along her cheek, resting her elbow in the cup of her other hand. “Well, perhaps he ought to have a Consort,” she said.

“Yes,” Grandfather Trout said.

“Just to trouble him, and keep his interest up.”

“Yes.”

“It is not good for man to be alone.”

“No,” said Grandfather Trout, though whether in agreement or denial was hard to tell when the word issued from a fish’s mouth. “Now let me sleep.”

“Yes!” she said. “Yes, of course a Consort! What have I been thinking of? Yes!” At every word her voice grew greater. Grandfather Trout sank quickly in fear, and the very ice melted away by inches from beneath Mrs. Underhill’s feet as she cried “Yes!” in a voice of thunder.

“Love!” she said to the others. “Not in the Was, not in the Will Be, but Now!”

“Love!” they all cried. Mrs. Underhill threw open a humpbacked trunk bound in black iron and began rummaging in it. She found what she wanted, wrapped it featly in white paper, bound it with red-and-white twine, neatly waxed the ends of the twine to keep them from raveling, took pen and ink, and on Mr. Woods’s bent back addressed a label: all in less time than it took to think of it. “Let him follow love,” she said when the package was made. “And so he’ll come. Willy.” She dotted a final i. “Nilly.”

“Aaaah,” they all said, and began to drift away, talking in low voices.

“You’ll never believe this,” Sylvie said to Auberon, bursting through the door into the Folding Bedroom, “but I got a job.” She’d been out all day. Her cheeks were red with March wind, her eyes bright.

“Hey.” He laughed, astonished, pleased. “Your Destiny?”

“Fuck destiny,” she said. She tore from its hanger the coffee-dyed outfit and flung it trashcanwards. “No more excuses,” she said. She pulled out work shoes, sweatshirt, muffler. She banged the shoes on the floor. “Have to dress warm,” she said. “I start tomorrow. No more excuses.”

“That’s a good day,” he said. “April Fool’s.”

“Just my day,” she said. “My lucky day.”

He laughed, raising her. April had come. And she in his embrace felt a thing that was at once relief at a danger avoided and a foreboding of that same danger, and her eyes filled at the safety she felt, within his arms, and at its fragility too. “Papo,” she said. “You’re the greatest, you know that? You really really are.”

“But tell me, tell me,” he said. “What’s this job?”

She grinned, hugging him. “You’ll never believe it,” she said.

In the tiny offices of Wingéd Messenger Service were: a counter or partition, behind which the dispatcher sat, chewing always an unlit cigar and plugging and unplugging the cords of the oldest PBX in the world and bellowing “Wingéd” into his headset; a line of gray metal folding chairs on which those messengers not at the moment carrying messages sat, some as still and lifeless as unplugged machines, some (like Fred Savage and Sylvie) engaged in conversation; a huge and ancient television on a chain-flown platform out of reach, forever on (Sylvie, if she wasn’t running, caught episodes of “A World Elsewhere”); some urns full of sand and cigarette butts; a crackle-finish brown time clock; a back office, containing a boss, his secretary, and at odd hours a hearty but ill-looking salesman; a metal door with a bar; no windows.

More Would Happen

It wasn’t a place Sylvie liked to stay in much. In its bare, fluorescent, hard-finish shabbiness she recognized too many places where she had spent too much of her childhood: the waiting rooms of public hospitals and asylums, welfare offices, police stations, places where a congress of faces and bodies in poor clothes gathered, dispersed, were replaced always by others. She didn’t, fortunately, have to spend much time there: Wingéd Messenger Service was as busy as it had ever been, and out on the cold spring streets, bound in work-boots and hooded sweatshirt (looking, she told Auberon, like a teenage dyke, but cute), she made time, glorying in the crowds, the posh offices, and the oddly-assorted secretaries (snooty, harsh, and mannered; slovenly; kind) whom she gave to and took away from. “Wingéd Messenger!” she shouted at them, no time to waste. “Sign here please.” And away, in elevators crowded with soft-voiced, fine-suited men on their way to lunch, or loud-voiced back-slappers returning. Though she never learned midtown as Fred Savage knew it—every underground access, every passageway, every building which, facing on one avenue, evacuated onto another, saving half a block for a walker—she did grasp the general, and find shortcuts; and she made her lefts and rights, ups and downs, with an accuracy she was proud of.

On a day early in May that had begun rainy (Fred Savage beside her wore a vast fedora swaddled in plastic) she sat restless on the edge of her chair, crossing her legs right over left and then left over right, watching “A World Elsewhere” and waiting for her name to be called.

“That guy,” she explained to Fred, “was the one who pretended to be the father of the kid whose real father was the other guy, who divorced the wife who fell for the girl who crashed the car that crippled the kid that lived in the house that this guy built.”

“Mm,” Fred said. Sylvie’s eyes hadn’t left the screen nor her ear the story, but Fred looked only at Sylvie.

“That’s him,” she said as the scene changed to a smoothhaired man sipping coffee and studying, silently, for a very long time, a letter addressed to someone else, trying apparently to decide whether he dared open it. He had been, Sylvie told Fred, wrestling with this temptation since April ended.

“If I was writing it,” she said, “more would happen.”

“I just bet it would,” Fred said, and the dispatcher said Sylvie.

She leapt up, though her eyes didn’t leave the screen; she took the dispatcher’s slip and started out.

“See ya,” she said to Fred and to an unresponsive overcoat and hat at the end of the row of chairs.

“More would happen, mm-mm,” said Fred, who still looked only at Sylvie. “I bet now it would at that.”

Something Going

The pickup was from a suite in a tall hotel of glass and steel, chill, sinister even, despite the factitious gaiety of its tropical lounges and English chophouse and hustle and bustle. She rode upward alone in a silent, thickly carpeted elevator in which nameless music played. At the thirteenth floor, the doors slid open, and Sylvie said “A! A!”, startled, because facing her was a vast blowup in color of Russell Eigenblick’s face, bushy eyebrows over limpid eyes, red red beard sprouting from his cheeks almost up to his eyes, mouth knowing, stem and kindly. The nameless elevator music became a radio, loud: a merengue.

She looked down the long plush corridor of the suite. Instead of a secretary of any sort, four or five young guys, black and P.R., made dance steps and drank Cokes around a vast rosewood desk. Those not in a sort of military undress wore bright loose shirts or jackets of many colors, Eigenblick’s troops’ insignia. “Hi,” she said, at ease now. “Wingéd Messenger Service.”

“Hey. Check the messenger.”

“Saayy…”

One of the dancers strutted toward her as the others laughed, and Sylvie did a step or two with him; another, with an expert air, manipulated the intercom. “A messenger’s here. We got something going?”

“So listen,” Sylvie said. “What about this guy—” thumb toward the vast portrait. “What’s with him?”

Some laughed; one looked solemn; the dancer fell back in astonishment at Sylvie’s ignorance. “Oh wow man,” he said, “oh man…”

He had just begun to put right forefinger into left palm to begin an explanation (cute, Sylvie thought him, well-muscled, real neighborhood) when double doors behind them were flung open. Sylvie caught a glimpse of huge rooms glossily furnished. A tall white guy with blond hair cut severely came out. With a quick gesture he ordered the radio silent. The young men drew together protectively, taking stances tough but wary. The blond man raised his chin and eyebrows at Sylvie inquiringly, too busy to say actual words.

“Wingéd Messenger.”

He considered her for a long moment, almost insolently. He had a good five inches on everybody else present, more than that on Sylvie. She crossed her arms, placed her booted feet in a “So?” attitude, and returned his look. He turned back into the rooms he had come from.

“What’s his problem?” she asked the others, but they seemed subdued. He was back anyway in a moment, with a parcel, oddly shaped, tied with an old-fashioned red-and-white twine Sylvie hadn’t seen in years, and addressed in a hand so fine and antique as to be almost illegible. Altogether it was one of the odder things she had been asked to carry.

“Don’t delay,” the man said, with what Sylvie thought might be the trace of an accent.

“I’m not gonna delay.” Turkey. “Sign here please.” The blond man drew back from her book as though it were repellent; he gestured to one of the boys, and backed through the doors, closing them after him.

“Wow,” she said as the good-looking one signed her book with a flourish and a final dot. “You work for him?”

Big gestures all around indicating resentment, defiance, resignation. The black one essayed a quick imitation, and the others fell out in exaggerated hut silent laughter. “Okay,” Sylvie said, seeing that the address was far uptown, a good long time away from the office, “see ya.”

The dancer accompanied her to the elevator, bringing out a quick line, listen I could use a message if you got one, no message for me, hey, listen, I wanna ask you sumpm, no this is serious; and after further chaff (she would have liked to stay, but the package under her arm seemed Somehow needful and exigent) he struck a comic pose as the elevator doors extinguished him to her. She did a few steps alone in the elevator, hearing other music than was playing there. Long time since she’d been dancing.

Uncle Daddy

Riding uptown, hands thrust in her sweatshirt’s front pockets and the weird’package beside her.

She should have asked those guys if they knew Bruno. She had heard nothing of her brother in some time; he wasn’t living with his wife and her mother, she knew that. Hustling somebody somewhere… But those guys weren’t together. Just something to do. Instead of hanging around the block. She thought of little Bruno: pobricito. She had vowed that, once a week at least, she would make the long journey out to Jamaica and visit him, take him away from them for a day. She hadn’t, not as often as she’d intended to: not at all in the last busy month. She renewed her vow, sensing at her back, pressing on her, a history of such neglects and their cumulative damage—the ones she had been subjected to, and her mother before her; and Bruno; her other nieces and nephews. Smothered with love, and left to sink or swim: what a system. Kids. And why did she think she could do it any differently? And yet she thought she could. With Auberon she might have kids. Sometimes her ghost children implored her to be born; she could almost see and hear them; she couldn’t resist forever. Auberon’s. She couldn’t do better, such a sweetie, good good man at heart, and for sure a hot number too: and yet. Often enough he treated her like a child herself. Not that she sometimes wasn’t one. But a child a mother… Uncle Daddy they both called him when he was in that mode or mood. He’d wiped her tears, though. He’d wipe her ass if she asked him to… What a mean thing to think.

What if they grew old together? How would that be? Two little old people, apple-cheeked and crinkly-eyed and white haired, full of years and affection. Nice… She’d like to see that big house and all that it contained. But his family. His mother was almost six feet tall, coño. She imagined the vast race of them towering over her, looking down. Sport model. George said they were a sweet bunch. He’d got lost more than once in that house. George: Lilac’s father, though Auberon didn’t know it, and George had sworn her to secrecy. Lost. What was that about? George knew more, but what he wouldn’t say. What if Auberon lost one of her kids? White people. She’d have to keep a sharp eye out, running around at knee level to them, holding on to her babies.

But if all that weren’t her Destiny: or if she really had escaped Destiny, refused it, turned it down… If she had, then, oddly, she seemed to have more future, rather than less. Anything could happen if she were free of the cramp of Destiny. Not Auberon, not Edgewood, not this town. Visionary men and pursuits, visionary places, visionary selves crowded up on the borders of her train-lulled consciousness. Anything… And a long table in the woods, dressed in a white cloth, set for a banquet; and everybody waiting; and an empty place in the middle…

Her head, falling suddenly breastwards, dipped her in vertigo, and she snapped awake.

Destiny, destiny. She yawned, covering her mouth, and then looked at her hand, and the silver ring on it. She’d worn it for years and years. Would it come off? She turned it. She tugged. She put her finger in her mouth to wet it. She pulled harder. Nope: stuck on good. But gently: yes, if she pushed gently from below… the silver circle slid upwards, over the big knuckle, and off. A strange lightness glowed around the naked finger, spreading outward from it to the rest of her; the world,, the train, seemed to grow pale and insubstantial. She looked slowly around herself.

The package that had been beside her on the seat was gone.

She leapt up, filled with horror, jamming the ring back on her finger. “Hey! Hey!” she said out loud, to alarm the thief if he was still nearby; she charged out into the middle of the car, sweeping the other riders with her glance, they looked up at her curious and guiltless. She looked again at where she had been sitting.

The package was right there where it had been.

She sat again slowly, wondering. She put her ringed hand on the smooth white paper of the package, just to make sure it was really there. It was: though it seemed, unaccountably, to have grown larger as it traveled uptown.

Definitely larger. Out on the street, where breezes had blown away the rain and clouds and brought in a real spring day, first one of the few the City was ever allowed, she chased down the address written on the package, which no longer quite fit beneath her arm. “What is with this thing,” she said aloud as she walked briskly through a neighborhood she hadn’t ever visited much, a neighborhood of great, dark-stained apartment-hotels and aged brownstones. She tried holding the package this way, then that; never had she been given anything so clumsy to carry. But the spring was vivifying; she couldn’t have wished for a better day on which to carry messages through the streets; winged was just what she felt. And summer would come soon, hot as hell, she couldn’t wait; she unzipped, tentatively, then boldly, the front of her sweatshirt, felt the breeze lick at her throat and breast, and found the feeling good. And there, ahead, must be the building she had been sent to.

Lost for Sure

It was a tall, white building, or a building that had once been white; it was covered with gloomy cast figures of every description. Two wings of it stuck out, forming a dank dark courtyard between them. Far above, at the top of the building, a course of masonry joined these two wings, making an arch absurdly high, an arch for a giant to pass under.

Sylvie glanced up at this monstrous fancy, and then quickly away. Tall buildings gave her the willies, she didn’t like looking up at them. She stepped into the courtyard, where puddles from the recent rain showed lurid rainbows of oil, but then had no idea how to find Room 001 as she must. An ancient porter’s lodge there by the entrance seemed to have been shuttered up tight for years and years, but she went to it anyway and pressed a rusted bell, if this thing works I’ll…

She didn’t get to complete her condition, for even as she pressed down the bell’s black nipple a small shutter flew open in the little lodge, and showed her the top half of a head, long nose, small eyes, bald dome. “Hi, can you tell me…” she began, but before she could ask further, the eyes crinkled up in a smile or a grimace, and a hand arose; with a long index finger, the hand indicated Left, then Down, and the shutter banged shut.

She laughed. What the hell do they pay him for? That? She followed his instructions, and found herself going in, not the central entrance with its steps and glass doors, but a wrought-iron grille or gate that led to stairs, which went down into an open areaway. Sun didn’t reach that narrow place, a sort of slot made by the rising towers. She went down, down, down to the echo-y, cavern-smelling bottom, where there was a small door, let into the wall. A very small door; but there was no other exit. “This can’t be right,” she said, shifting the impossible package (it seemed to be changing shape, and had grown very heavy too). “I’m lost for sure.” But she pushed open the door.

It opened on a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor. Down at the far small end, someone was standing before a door, doing something: painting the door? He had a brush, and a paint-pot. Super, or super’s helper. Sylvie thought she’d ask further instructions from him, but when she called “Hi,” he looked back at her in alarm, and vanished through the door he’d been working on. She marched up to it anyway, reaching it with surprising suddenness, the corridor was shorter than it seemed, or seemed longer than it was, whichever; and the door at its end was even smaller than the one she’d come in by. If this keeps up, she thought, I’ll be crawling next… On the door, in fresh white paint in an antique style, the number 001 was painted.

Laughing a little, a little nervously, uncertain now and not at all sure that an elaborate joke wasn’t being played on her, Sylvie knocked at the little door. “Wingéd Messenger,” she called.

The door opened a crack. A strange, outdoor, summergold light seemed to come through it from beyond. A very long, very knuckly hand was put around the door to open it further, and then a very widely grinning face looked out.

“Wingéd Messenger?” Sylvie said.

“Yes? What is it? What can we do for you?” He was the man she’d seen painting the number on the door, or someone just like him; or he was the man who’d directed her here. Or someone just like him.

“Package for you,” she said.

“Aha,” the little man said. His grin unabated, he opened the door wider so she could stoop to enter. “Do come in, then,”

“Are you sure,” she said, looking within, “that this is where I’m spose to be?”

“Oh, it certainly is.”

“Boy. It’s real little in here.”

“Oh, yes it is. Won’t you please step right on in.”

The Wild Wood

Out on the same May streets at evening, Auberon dawdling Farmwards through the brand-new spring thought of fame, and fortune, and love. He was returning from the offices of the production company that created and sustained “A World Elsewhere” and several other less successful ventures. He had there given into the manicured hands of a remarkably friendly but somewhat absent man of not much more than his own age two scripts for imaginary episodes of their famous soap. Coffee had been pressed on him, and the young man (who didn’t seem to have a lot of business on hand) had talked ramblingly about television, and writing, and production; huge figures of money were mentioned, and arcana of the business touched on—Auberon tried hard not to be astonished at the first and nodded sagely at the latter though he understood little enough of it; and then he’d been shown out, with invitations to drop around any time, by a secretary and a receptionist of near-legendary beauty.

Amazing and wonderful. Large vistas opened before Auberon on the crowded street. The scripts, his and Sylvie’s collaboration through long, hilarious and excited evenings, were shapely and thrilling, he thought, though not exquisite to look at, typed as they were on George’s old machine; no matter, no matter, his future was filled with expensive office equipment, and with long lunches, prize secretaries, hard work for great rewards. He would seize, from between the claws of the dragon who was denned in the heart of the Wild Wood, the golden treasure it guarded.

The Wild Wood: yes. There had been a time, he knew, say when Frederick Barbarossa was emperor of the West, a time when it had been beyond the log walls of tiny towns, beyond the edges of the harrowed land, that the forest began: the forest, where there lived wolves, and bears, witches in vanishing cottages, dragons, giants. Inside the town, all was reasonable and ordinary; there were safety, fellows, fire and food and all comforts. Dull, maybe, more sensible than thrilling, but safe. It was beyond, in the Wild Wood, that anything could happen, any adventure could be had; out there you took your life in your hands.

No more though. It was all upside down now. At Edgewood, upstate, night held no terrors; the woods there were tame, smiling, comfortable. He didn’t know if there were any locks that still worked on the many doors of Edgewood; certainly he’d never seen any of them locked. On hot nights, he’d often slept out on open porches, or in the woods themselves, listening to the sounds and the silence. No, it was on these streets that you saw wolves, real and imagined; here you barricaded your door against whatever fearful thing might be Out There, as once the doors of woodsmen’s huts were barred; horrid stories were told of what could happen here after the sun has set; here you had the adventures, won the prizes, lost your way and were swallowed up without a trace, learned to live with the fear in your throat and snatch the treasure: this, this was the Wild Wood now, and Auberon was a woodsman.

Yes! Greed for treasure bred daring in him, and daring made him strong; errant, armed, he strode through the crowd. Let the weak be gobbled up, he would not be. He thought of Sylvie, clever as a fox, woods-bred though born in the complacent safety of a jungle island. She knew this place; her greed was as great as his, greater, and her cunning matched it. What a team! And to think that not many weeks ago they two had seemed stuck in a deadfall, to have lost each other in trackless undergrowth, to be on the point of surrendering to it all, and parting. Parting. God, what chances she took! How narrow the odds were!

But he could believe, just now, this evening, that they would grow old together. The joy they took in each other, in abeyance all that cold bitter March, had flowered again bright and tough as clustered dandelions—that very morning, in fact, she had been late for work for a reason, a new reason; late, because a certain elaborate process had had to be successfully brought to conclusion—oh, God, the fabulous exertions they required of one another, and the rests those exertions required, a life could be spent in the one and then the other, he felt that his nearly had been so spent all in that morning. And yet unending: he felt it could be, saw no reason why it should not be. He drifted to a halt in the middle of an intersection, grinning, blind; his heartbeats seemed to be minted in gold as moment upon moment of that morning was relived within his breast. A truck blared at him, a truck desperate not to miss the light, its light, which Auberon was flouting. Auberon leapt from its path and the driver yelled something pointed but unintelligible at him. Struck down blinded by love, Auberon thought (laughing and safe on the far sidewalk), that’s how I’ll die, struck by a truck when I’m whelmed with lust and love and forget where I am.

He took up a quick City stride, still grinning but trying to be alert. Keep your wits about you. After all, he thought, but got no further in the thought, for there came at that moment, crashing down the avenue or swarming up the side-streets or descending from the balmy sky like a ton of shrieking laughter, a thing that was like a sound but wasn’t one: the bomb that had fallen once on him and Sylvie, but double that or greater. It rolled over him, it might have been the truck that had missed him, yet it seemed to burst from his own person. Coursing away from him up the avenue, leaving him sundered, the thing seemed to make a vacuum behind it or within it that tugged at his clothes and ruffled his hair. Still his feet fell in good order—the thing had no power to hurt him physically at least—but the smile was quite wiped from his face.

Oh boy, they really mean business now; that was his thought. But he didn’t know why he thought it, or what business he thought they meant, or for that matter who he thought they were.

This Is War

At that moment, far to the west in a state whose name begins with I, Russell Eigenblick, the Lecturer, was on the point of rising from his folding chair to address another immense gathering. He had a small deck of index cards in his hands, a pimento-flavored belch in his throat (chicken a la king again) and a throbbing pain in his left leg, just below the buttock. He wasn’t feeling particularly justified. That morning, in the stables of his wealthy hosts, he had mounted a horse and trotted sedately around a small enclosure. Posing for photographers thus, he had looked confident (as always) and somewhat too small (as always, nowadays; upon a time, he had been well above average height). Then he had been induced to take a gallop over fields and meadows as barbered and neat as any chase he had ever ridden. A mistake, that. He hadn’t explained that it had been centuries since he’d last been on a horse; he seemed lately to have lost the strength for such provocative remarks. Now he wondered if an ungainly limp would mar his approach to the dais.

How long, how long, he thought. It wasn’t that he shunned the work, or resented the trials that were part of it. His paladins strove to ease the process for him, and he was grateful, but the squalid intimacies of this age, the backsiapping and arm-taking, didn’t really bother him. He had never stood on ceremony. He was a practical man (or thought himself to be so), and if this was what his people—as he already thought of them—wanted of him, he could give it. A man who without complaint had slept amid the wolves of Thuringia and the scorpions of Palestine could suffer motels, could service aging hostesses, could catnap on planes. Only there were times (as now) when the strangeness of his long journey, too impossible to seize, bored him; and the great sleep with which he had grown so familiar tugged at him, and he longed to lay his heavy head once again on his comrades’ shoulders, and close his eyes.

His eyes were drifting closed even at the thought.

Then there came, bowling outward in all directions from its starting place, the thing Auberon in the City had felt or heard: a thing that turned the world for a moment to shot silk, or changed in a wink the changeable taffeta of its stuff. A bomb, Auberon had thought it to be; Russell Eigenblick knew it wasn’t a bomb but a bombardment.

Like a sharp restorative it shot throught his veins. His weariness vanished, He heard the end of the encomium which introduced him, and he sprang from his chair, eyes alight, mouth grim. He let flutter away, dramatically, the handful of notes for this Lecture as he mounted the dais; the vast audience, seeing this, gasped and cheered. Eigenblick gripped the edges of the lectern with both hands, leaned forward, and bellowed into the microphones that gaped before him to receive his words: “You must change your lives!”

A wave of astonishment, the wave of his own amplified voice washing the crowd, lifted them up, struck the back wall, and returned to break over him. “You must. Change. Your lives!” The wave curled back on them, a tsunami. Eigenblick gloried, sweeping the crowd and seeming to look deeply into every eye, into every heart: they knew it, too. Words crowded into his brain, formed sentences, platoons, regiments against whom resistance was hopeless. He unleashed them.

“The preparations are finished, the votes are in, the die is cast, the chips are down! Everything you most dreaded has already occurred. Your ancientest enemies have the whip hand now. To whom will you turn? Your fortress is all chinks, your armor is paper, your old laughter is a reproach in your throat. Nothing—nothing is as you supposed it to be. You have been deeply fooled. You have been staring into a mirror and supposing it to be the old road’s long continuation, but the road has run out, dead end, no through traffic. You must change your lives!”

He drew upright. Such winds were blowing in Time that he had difficulty hearing himself speak. In those winds rode the armed heroes, mounted at last, sylphs in battle-dress, hosts in the middle of the air. Eigenblick, as he harangued the open-mouthed mass before him, lashed them, threshed them, felt himself bursting restraints and coming forth whole at last. As though in a moment he had grown too large for an old worn carapace, with delicious itchy relief he felt it split and crack. He paused, until he knew it had all been shed. The crowd held its breath. Eigenblick’s new voice coming forth, loud, low, insinuating, made them shiver as one: “Well. You didn’t know. Oh, no. How were yoouu to know? You never thought. You for got. You hadn’t heard.” He leaned forward, looking out over them like a terrible parent, speaking rapidly, as though he spoke a curse: “Well, there will be no forgiveness this time. This time is once too often. Surely you see that, surely you knew it all along. You might, in your secretest heart, if you ever allowed yourself to suspect that this would happen, and you did suspect it, you did, you might have hoped that once again, once again there would be mercy, however undeserved; another chance, however badly bungled every other chance had been; that at the very last you would be ignored, you, only you would be missed out, overlooked, not counted, lost blameless in the cracks of the catastrophe that must engulf all else. No! Not this time!”

“No! No!” They cried out to him, afraid; he was moved, deep love for their helplessness, deep pity for their state filled him and made him powerful and strong.

“No,” he said softly, cooing to them, rocking them in the arms of his bottomless wrath and pity, “no, no; Arthur sleeps in Avalon; you have no champion, no white hope; nothing is left to you but surrender, don’t you see that, you do, don’t you? Surrender; that’s your only chance; show your rusted sword, useless as a toy; show yourselves, helpless, innocent of any of the causes or conclusions of this, aged, confused, weak as babes. And still. And still. Helpless and pitiable as you are”—he held out commiserating arms to them with great slowness, he could hold them all and comfort them— “eager to please as you are, full of love, asking only with softest tears in your big babe’s eyes for mercy, pity peace; still, still.” The arms descended, the big hands again gripped the lectern as though it were a weapon, a huge fire burst within Russell Eigenblick’s bosom, horrid gratitude engulfed him that he could lean down upon these microphones at last and say this: “Still it will not draw their pity, none of it, for they have none; or stay their awful weapons, for they have already been loosed; or change anything at all: for this is war.” Lower he bent his’ head, closer his satyr’s lips came to the aghast microphones, and his whisper boomed: “Ladies and gentleMEN, THIS IS WAR.”

Unexpected Seam

Ariel Hawksquill, in the City, had felt it too: a change, like a flash of menopause, but not happening to herself but to the world at large. A Change, then; not a change but a Change, a Change glimpsed bowling along the course of space and time, or the world stumbling over a thick and unexpected seam in the seamless fabric.

“Did you feel that?” she said.

“Feel what, my dear?” said Fred Savage, still chuckling over the ferocious headlines of yesterday’s paper.

“Forget it,” Hawksquill said softly, thoughtful. “Well. About cards, now. Anything at all about cards? Think hard.”

“The ace of spades reversed,” Fred Savage said. “Queen of spades in your bedroom window, fierce as any bitch. Jack of diamonds, on the road again. King of hearts, that’s me, baby,” and he began to sing-hum through his ivory teeth, his buttocks moving slightly but snappily on the long, buttock-polished bench of the waiting room.

Hawksquill had come to the great Terminus to question this old oracle of hers, knowing that most evenings after work he could be found here, confiding strange truths to strangers; pointing out with an index finger brown, gnarled, and dirt-clogged as a root, certain items in yesterday’s paper which the train-takers around him might have missed, or discoursing on how a woman who wears a fur takes on the propensities of the animal—Hawksquill thought of timid suburban girls wearing rabbit-furs dyed to look like lynx, and laughed. Sometimes she brought a sandwich to share with him, if he were eating. Usually she went away wiser than she had come.

“Cards,” she said. “Cards and Russell Eigenblick.”

“That fella,” he said. He was lost awhile in thought. He shook out his paper as though shaking a troublesome notion from it. But it wouldn’t go.

“What is it?” she said.

“Now damn if there wasn’t a change just now,” he said, looking upward. “Sumpm… What was it, did you say?”

“I didn’t say.”

“You said a name.”

“Russell Eigenblick. In the cards.”

“In the cards,” he said. He folded his paper carefully. “That’s enough,” he said. “That’ll do.”

“Tell me,” she said, “what you think.”

But she had pressed him too hard, always a danger, ask the great virtuosi for one more encore and they will turn petulant and surly. Fred rose—as far as he ever rose, remaining bent like a quizzical letter—and felt for something nonexistent in his pockets. “Gotta go see m’uncle,” he said. “You wouldn’t have a buck for the bus? Some kinda buck or change?”

From East to West

She walked back through the vast arching hall of the Terminus no wiser this time than when she had come, and more troubled. The hundreds who hurried there, eddying around the shrinelike clock in the center and washing up in waves against the ticket booths, seemed distracted, hard-pressed, uncertain of their fates: but whether more so than on any other day she wasn’t sure. She looked up: grown faint with age and long watching, the Zodiac painted in gold marched biaswise across the night-blue dome, pricked out with tiny lights, many of them extinguished. Her steps slowed, her mouth fell open; she turned, staring, unable to believe what she saw.

The Zodiac ran the proper way across the dome from east to west.

Impossible. It had always been one of her favorite jokes about this mad City that its grand center was watched over by a Zodiac that was backwards, the mistake of a star-ignorant muralist, or some sly pun on his star-crossed City. She had wondered what reversals might happen if—with proper preparation—one were to walk backwards through the Terminus beneath this backwards cosmos, but propriety had always kept her from trying it.

But look now. Here was the rain in his right place, and the hindquarterless bull, the twins and the crab, King Lion and the virgin and the double-panned scales. The poised scorpion next, with red Antares in his sting; the centaur with his bow, the fish-tailed goat, the man with the water-jug. And the two fishes bow-tied at the tails. The crowds flowed around her where she stood gawking, flowed without pause as they did around any fixed object in their path. Her looking upward was infectious, as in the hoary trick; others looked upward too, searching briefly, but, unable to see the impossible thing she saw, hurried on.

The ram, the bull, the twins… She struggled to retain her memory that they had been otherwise, had not always had this order, for they looked as old and immutable as the stars they pictured. She grew afraid. A Change: and what other changes would she find, out on the streets; what others lay in the to-come, yet to be manifested? What anyway was Russell Eigenblick doing to the world; and why on earth was she sure that it was Russell Eigenblick who was Somehow at fault? A sweet baritone bell struck, and echoed around her as she stared, not loud but clear, calm as though possessed of the secret: the Terminus clock, ringing the small time of the hour.

Sylvie?

The same hour was being rung in the pyramidal steeple of a building which Alexander Mouse had built downtown, the only steeple in the City that rang the hours for the public enlightenment. One of the four notes of its four-note tune was silenced, and the others fell irregularly into the channel of streets below, blown away by wind or muffled by traffic, so it was no help usually, but Auberon (unbarring and unbolting a door into Old Law Farm) didn’t care what time it was anyway. He gave a glance around himself to see that he wasn’t followed by thieves. (He’d already been robbed once, by two kids who, since he’d had no money, had taken the bottle of gin he was carrying, and then took and flung his hat to the ground and stepped on it with long sneakered feet as they went away.) He slipped in, and bolted and barred the door behind him.

Down the hall, through a brick-toothed rent George had made in the wall to give access to the next building, up that hall, up the stairs, gripping the banister iced thickly with generations of paint. Out a hall window onto a fire escape, a wave to the happy farmers at work with shoots and trowels down below, and back into another building, another hall, absurdly narrow and close, familiar in its gloom and joyful, for it led home. He glimpsed himself in the pretty mirror Sylvie had hung on the wall at the end of the hall, with a tiny table below it and a bowl of dried flowers, bien nice. The doorknob didn’t open the door. “Sylvie?” Not home. Not back from work, or out farming; or just out, the reborn sun caused the blue island lagoon in her blood to rise. He hunted out his three keys and peered at them in the dark, growing impatient. Ovoid-ended for the top lock, keystone-ended for the middle, oh hell! He dropped one, and had to get down on hands and knees, furious, and feel for it amid the irremediable antique filth of all City nooks and crannies. Here it was: huge, round-ended one for the police lock, which kept the police out, ha ha.

“Sylvie?”

The Folding Bedroom seemed oddly large, and, though sunlight poured in through all its little windows, Somehow not cheerful. What was it? The place seemed swept, but not tidy; cleaned, but not clean. There was a lot of stuff missing, he gradually realized; a lot of stuff. Had they been robbed? He went gingerly into the kitchen. Sylvie’s collection of unguents and such that clustered above the sink was gone. Her shampoos and hairbrushes, gone. It was all gone. All but his own old Gillette.

In the bedroom likewise. Her totems and pretty things, gone. Her china señorita, with a dead-white face and black spitcurls, whose top half separated from her flaring skirt which was really a jewel box, gone. Her hats hung on the back of the door, gone. Her crazy envelope of important papers and assorted snapshots, gone.

He tore open the closet door. Empty coat-hangers clanged, and his own overcoat hung on the door flung out startled sleeves, but there was nothing at all of hers there.

Nothing at all.

He looked around him, and then looked around him again. And then stood still in the middle of the empty floor.

“Gone,” he said.