Little, Big Part 25

"Warm," he said, and took the neck and shoulders he had revealed by turns between his lips, sucking and munching like a cannibal. Flesh. But all alive, all alive. "I'm melting," she said. He entwined her in him as though his long body could swallow hers, a morsel but endless. He bent to her nakedness, a banquet. "In fact I'm cooking," she said, and she was, her warmth and comfort deep as it was heated further and made more perfect by the incandescent jewel within her; she watched him for a moment, amazed and gratified, watched him swallow her endlessly toward his hollow heart; then she went wandering, and he too, both again in the same realm (later they would speak of it, and compare the places they had been, and find them the same); a realm where they were led, so Auberon thought, by Lilac; coupled, not walking, but still wandering, they were led down concave weed-spined lanes in an endless land, down the twists and turns of a long, long story, a boundless and-then, toward a place something like the place Sophie at Edgewood contemplated in the dark-etched trump called the Banquet: a long table clothed in just-unfolded linen, its claw-feet absurd in the flowers beneath twisted and knotty trees, the tall compote overflowing, the symmetrical candelabra, the many places set, all empty.

They neither work nor weep; in their shape is their reason.

a"Virginia Woolf 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 pa.s.s; 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 b.u.t.tercup 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 a"

"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 a"

"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 ina"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 educationala ."

"Oh yes!"

"And education after all was all the pointa ."

"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 seea ." 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 a" There was a heavy beating of wings outside, and a long broken shadow pa.s.sed 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 dreamta"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 smallera"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 s.h.i.+ngled 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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, cas.e.m.e.nts 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 a 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 cas.e.m.e.nts 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 cas.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sed, 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 cas.e.m.e.nt, 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 cas.e.m.e.nt 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 cas.e.m.e.nt 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-sh.e.l.l combs, a music-box. A glossy china figurine, a bird with a naked child and an old woman on its back. A big blue gla.s.s 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. (Smas.h.i.+ng 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 gla.s.s ball smas.h.i.+ng; 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 outa" 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 coa.r.s.e 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"a"she tapped with her sticka""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 garagea"the old wooden station wagon slept here in the darka"and was now also where b.u.mb.u.m 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 alt.i.tude, Lilac could see Smoky far down the same path, eyes on the ground, books under his arm.

"Is that a" 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 a"

"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 ma.s.sy 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 cas.e.m.e.nt 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 s.h.i.+rts (one like a jacket) grown somewhat small in a burst of growing he was doing, but still b.u.t.toned 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, amus.e.m.e.nts 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 s.p.a.ces 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 onea"not very like her own Auberon really, but the same, there was no doubt of ita"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 pa.s.sed. 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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 someonea"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 wasa"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 facesa . 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 pa.s.s 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 gla.s.s (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.