Little, Big Part 27

She went awaya"Smoky watched the changeful light on walls and furniture flash and dima"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 awakea"and won't give ina"and has to keep jumping from one position to anothera ."

"Just barely waking you up every time a"

"Yes, so your head can'ta"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 anywherea ."

"Sorting over and over the same handful of nonsense, yup; until you have to give in, and get upa ."

"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'sa"well, not alive a"

"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 a 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 flowera"for one thing she was no maidena"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 facta"besides Smoky leading the way by candlelight to the kitchena"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 jibaro 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 s.e.xtet (well and long rehea.r.s.ed) 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.

"t.i.ti," she said, touching the old woman's arm (for La Negra still stared at her in something like surprise and didn't speak), "t.i.ti, 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 gla.s.s 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 a"

"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 a"

"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, t.i.ti," Sylvie said. "He's not that rich."

"Well a"

"But I love him," Sylvie said. "And I don't want some big Destiny coming along and s.n.a.t.c.hing 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 wella . "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 a 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. "t.i.ti?" 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 mistakea ."

"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 pa.s.sed the test put to her and deserved something: but not dirty bills for buying groceries, not money pa.s.sed 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 sc.r.a.p 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 gla.s.s 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 therea"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 fas.h.i.+on 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 c.u.mbersome 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 a.s.sembled 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 gla.s.ses 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 t.i.ta, which had also stuck, and which in its turn became (a grand diminutive) t.i.tania. 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 tooa ."

"But papo, I was so embarra.s.sed when you put your feet up on thata"esta thinga"that coffee-table thing."

"Oh?"

"That was very bad. Everybody noticed."

"Well, why the h.e.l.l didn't you say something?" he said, embarra.s.sed. "I mean at home we lay all over the furniture, and it was a" 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 t.i.ti 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-p.r.o.ne crowd; and often, though Auberon dismissed them as night terrors (for nothinga"not one thing he knew ofa"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 a.s.sembled (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 pa.s.sed. The Seventh Saint must once have been somewhat splendid, for this gla.s.s wall was tinted a rich, expensive brown, which added a further unreality to the scene, and which darkened the interior like dark gla.s.ses. 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.