Little, Big Part 54

"Part way," Lilac said. She stood in the center of the company, pleased, yet a little awed too, and not sure herself which of these would keep on till the end, and having not enough fingers to count. "Part way."

"Is it that way?" Sophie asked, pointing to the stone gateposts. They all turned and looked that way. The first crickets' voices began. Edgewood's swifts cut the air, air blue and turning green. Exhalations of the cooling earth made the way beyond those gateposts obscure.

Had that been the moment, Smoky wondered; had it been that moment, when he had turned in at those stone gateposts for the first time, that the charm had fallen on him, not ever after that to release him? The arm and hand with which he held the carpetbag tingled like a warning bell, but Smoky didn't hear it.

"How far, how far?" asked Bud and Blossom hand in hand.

On that day: the day he had first gone in at Edgewood's door and then in some sense never again back out.

Perhaps: or it may have been before that, or after it, but it wasn't a matter of figuring out when exactly the first charm had invaded his life, or when he had stumbled unwittingly into it, because another had come soon after, and another, they had succeeded one another by a logic of their own, each one occasioned by the last and none removable; even to try to disentangle them would only be the occasion for further charms, and anyway they had never been a causal chain but a series of removes, Chinese boxes one inside the other, the further in you went the bigger it got. And it didn't end now: he was about to step into a new series, endless, infundibular, utter. Apalled by a prospect of endless variation, he was only glad that some things had remained constant: Alice's love chief among them. It was toward that that he journeyed, the only thing that could draw him; and yet he felt that he left it behind; and still he carried it with him.

"A dog to meet us," Sophie said, taking his hand. "A river to cross."

Something began to open in Smoky's heart as he stepped from the porch: a premonition, or the intimation of a revelation.

They had all begun to move, taking up their bags and belongings, talking in low voices, down the drive. But Smoky stopped, seeing he could not go out by that gate: could not go out by the gate through which he had come in. Too many charms had intervened. The gate wasn't the same gate; he wasn't the same either.

"A long way," Lilac said, drawing her mother after her. "A long, long way."

They pa.s.sed him on either side, burdened and holding hands, but he had stopped: still willing, still journeying, only not walking.

On his wedding day, he and Daily Alice had gone among the guests seated on the gra.s.s, and many of them had given gifts, and all of them had said "Thank you." Thank you: because Smoky was willing, willing to take on this task, to take exception to none of it, to live his life for the convenience of others in whom he had never even quite believed, and spend his substance bringing about the end of a Tale in which he did not figure. And so he had; and he was still willing: but there had never been a reason to thank him. Because whether they knew it or not, he knew that Alice would have stood beside him on that day and wed him whether they had chosen him for her or not, would have defied them to have him. He was sure of it.

He had fooled them. No matter what happened now, whether he reached the place they set out for or didn't, whether he journeyed or stayed behind, he had his tale. He had it in his hand. Let it end: let it end: it couldn't be taken from him. He couldn't go where all of them were going, but it didn't matter, for he'd been there all along.

And where was it, then, that all of them were going?

"Oh, I see," he said, though no sound came from his lips. The something that had begun to open in his heart opened further; it let in great draughts of evening air, and swifts, and bees in the hollyhocks; it hurt beyond pain, and wouldn't close. It admitted Sophie and his daughters, and his son Auberon too, and many dead. He knew how the Tale ended, and who would be there.

"Face to face," Marge Juniper said, pa.s.sing by him. "Face to face." But Smoky heard nothing now but the wind of Revelation blowing in him; he would not, this time, escape it. He saw, in the blue midst of what entered him, Lilac, turning back and looking at him curiously; andby her face he knew that he was right.

The Tale was behind them. And it was to there they journeyed. One step would take them there; they were there already.

"Back there," he tried to say, unable himself to turn in that direction, back there, he tried to tell them, back to where the house stood lit and waiting, the Park and the porches and the walled garden and the lane into the endless lands, the door into summer. If he could turn now (but he could not, it didn't matter that he could not but he could not) he would find himself facing summer's house; and on a balcony there, Daily Alice greeting him, dropping from her shoulders the old brown robe to show him her nakedness amid the shadows of leaves: Daily Alice, his bride, Dame Kind, G.o.ddess of that land behind them, on whose borders they stood, the land called the Tale. If he could reach those stone gateposts (but he never would) he would find himself only turning in at them, Midsummer Day, bees in the hollyhocks, and an old woman on the porch there turning over cards.

A Wake Under an enormous moon full to bursting Sylvie traveled toward the house she had seen, which seemed to be further and further off the closer she came to it. There was a stone fence to climb, and a beech-wood to go through; there was finally a stream to cross, or an enormous river, rus.h.i.+ng and gold-foamed in the moonlight. After long thought on its banks, Sylvie made a boat of bark, with a broad leaf for a sail, spider-web lines and an acorn-cup to bail with, and (though nearly swept into the mouth of a dark lake where the river poured underground) she reached the far bank; the flinty house, huge as a cathedral, looked down on her, its dark yews pointing in her direction, its stone-pillared porches warning her away. And Auberon always said it was a cheerful house!

Just as she was thinking that she never would quite reach it, or if she did would reach it as such an atomy that she would fall between the cracks of its paving-stones, she stopped and listened. Amid the sounds of beetles and nightjars, somewhere there was music, somber yet Somehow full of gladness; it drew Sylvie on, and she followed it. It grew, not louder but more full; she saw the lights of a procession gather around her in the furry darkness of the underwood, or saw anyway the fireflies and night-flowers as though in procession, a procession she was one of. Wondering, her heart filled with the music, she approached the place to which the lights tended; she pa.s.sed through portals where many looked up to see her enter. She put her feet in the sleeping flowers of a lane, a lane that led to a glade where more were gathered, and more coming: where beneath a flowering tree the white-clothed table stood, many places set, and one in the center for her. Only it was not a banquet, as she had thought, or not only a banquet; it was a wake.

Shy, sad for those saddened by whosoever death it was they mourned, she stood a long time watching, her present for Auberon held tight under her arm, listening to the iow sounds of their voices. Then one turned at the end of the table, and his black hat tilted up, and his white teeth grinned to see her. He raised a cup to her, and waved her forward. Gladder than she could have imagined to see him, she made her way through the throng to him, many eyes turning toward her, and hugged him, tears in her throat. "Hey," she said. "Heeeey."

"Hey," George said. "Now everybody's here."

Holding him, she looked around at the crowded table, dozens present, smiling or weeping or draining cups, some crowned, some furred or feathered (a stork or somebody like one dipped her beak in a tall cup, eying with misgivings a grinning fox beside her) but Somehow room for all. "Who are all these people?" she said.

"Family," George said.

"Who died?" Sylvie whispered.

"His father," George said, and pointed out a man who sat, bent-backed, a handkerchief over his face, and a leaf stuck in his hair. The man turned, sighing deeply; the three women with him, looking up and smiling at Sylvie as though they knew her, turned him further to face her.

"Auberon," Sylvie said.

Everyone watched as they met. Sylvie could say nothing, the tears of Auberon's grief were still on his face, and he had nothing that he could say to her, so they only took hands. Aaaah, said all the guests. The music altered; Sylvie smiled, and they cheered her smile. Someone crowned her with odorous white blooms, and Auberon likewise, taking chaplets of locust-flower from the locust-tree which overhung the feast-table. Cups were raised, and toasts shouted; there was laughter. The music pealed. With her brown ringed hand, Sylvie brushed the tears from her prince's face.

The moon sailed toward morning; the banquet turned from wake to wedding, and grew riotous; the people stood up to dance, and sat down to eat and drink.

"I knew you'd be here," Sylvie said. "I knew it."

A Real Gift In his certainty that she was here now, the fact that Auberon had himself not known at all that she would be here dissolved. "I was sure too," he said. "Sure.

"But," he said, "why, a while agoa"" he had no sense of how long ago it had been, hours, ages "a" when I called your name, why didn't you stop, and turn around?"

"Did you?" she said. "Did you call my name?"

"Yes. I saw you. You were going away. I called *Sylvie!'"

"Sylvie?" She looked at him in cheerful puzzlement. "Oh!" she said at length. "Oh! Sylvie! Well, see, I forgot. Because it's been so long. Because they never call me that here. They never did."

"What do they call you?"

"Another name," she said. "A nickname I had when I was a kid."

"What name?" he said.

She told him.

"Oh," he said. "Oh."

She laughed to see his face. She poured foaming drink into his cup and offered it to him. He drank. "So listen," she said. "I want to hear all your adventures. All of them. Don't you want to hear mine?"

All of them, all of them, he thought, the honeyed liquor he drank was.h.i.+ng away any sense he might have had of what they could be, it was as though they were all yet to happen, and he would be in them. A prince and a princess: the Wild Wood. Had she then been there, in that kingdom, their kingdom, all along? Had he? What anyway had his adventures been? They vanished, crumpling into broken nothings even as he thought of them, they became as dim and unreal as a gloomy future, even as the future opened before him like a storied past.

"I should have known," he said laughing. "I should have known."

"Yes," she said. "Just beginning. You'll see."

Not one story, no, not one story with one ending but a thousand stories, and so far from over as hardly to have begun. She was swept away from him then by laughing dancers, and he watched her go, there were many hands importuning her, many creatures at her quick feet, and her smile was frank for all of them. He drank, inflamed, his feet itching to learn the antic-hay. And could she, he thought watching her, still cause him pain, too? He touched the gift which in their revels she had placed on his brow, two handsome, broad, ridged and exquisitely recurving horns, heavy and brave as a crown, and thought about them. Love wasn't kind, not always; a corrosive thing, it burned away kindness as it burned away grief. They were infants now in power, he and she, but they would grow; their quarrels would darken the moon and scatter the frightened wild things like autumn gales, would do so, had long done so, it didn't matter.

Doesn't matter, doesn't matter. Her aunt was a witch, but his sisters were queens of air and darkness; their gifts had once aided him, and would again. He was heir to his father's bafflements, but he could touch his mother for strengtha . As though turning the pages of an endless compendium of romances, all read long ago, he saw the thousands of her children, generations of them, most of them his, he would lose track of them, meet them as strangers, love them, lie with them, fight them, forget them. Yes! They would blunt the pens of a dozen chroniclers with their story and the stories their story generated, tedious, hilarious, or sad; their feasts, their b.a.l.l.s, their masques and quarrels, the old curse laid on him and her kiss that mitigated it, their long partings, her vanis.h.i.+ngs and disguises (crone, castle, bird, he foresaw or remembered many but not all), their reunions and couplings tender or lewd: it would be a spectacle for all, an endless and-then. He laughed a huge laugh, seeing that it would be so: for he had a gift for that, after all; a real gift.

"Y'see?" said the black locust-tree that overhung the feast-table, the locust from which the flowers that decked Auberon's horned head had been taken. "Y'see? Jes' oney the brave deserve the fair.

She's Here, She's Near The dance whirled around the prince and princess, marking a wide circle in the dewy gra.s.s; the fireflies, toward dawn, turned in a great circle in obedience to the turning of Lilac's finger, wheeling in the opulent darkness. Aaaah, said all the guests.

"Just the beginning," Lilac said to her mother. "You see? Just like I told you."

"Yes, but Lilac," Sophie said. "You lied to me, you know. About the peace treaty. About meeting them face to face."

Lilac, elbow on the littered table, rested her cheek in the cup of her hand, and smiled at her mother. "Did I?" she said, as though she couldn't remember that.

"Face to face," Sophie said, looking along the broad table. How many were the guests? She'd count them, but they moved around so, and diminished uncountably into the sparkling darkness; some were crashers, she thought, that fox, maybe that gloomy stork, certainly this clumsy stag-beetle that staggered amid the spilled cups flouris.h.i.+ng its black antlers; anyway she didn't need to count in order to know how many were here. Onlya""Where's Alice, though?" she said. "Alice should be here."

She's here, she's near, said her Little Breezes, moving among the guests. Sophie trembled for Alice's grief; the music altered once again, and a sadness and a stillness came over the company.

"Call for the robin-redbreast an' the wren," said the locust-tree, dropping white petals like tears on the feast-table. "Keep m'man Duke far hence that's foe to man."

The breezes rose to dawn winds, blowing away the music. "Our revels now are ended," sighed the locust-tree. Alice's white hand blotted out the grieving moon like clouds, and the sky grew blue. The stag-beetle fell off the edge of the table, the ladybug flew away home, the fireflies turned down their torches; the cups and dishes scattered like leaves before the coming day.

Come from his burial, none knew where but she, Daily Alice came among them like daybreak, her tears like day-odorous dew. They swallowed tears and wonder before her presence, and made to leave; but no one would say later that she hadn't smiled for them, and made them glad with her blessing, as they parted. They sighed, some yawned, they took hands; they took themselves by twos and threes away to where she sent them, to rocks, fields, streams and woods, to the four corners of the earth, their kingdom new-made.

Then Alice walked alone there, by where the moist ground was marked with the dark circle of their dance, her skirts trailing damp in the sparkling gra.s.ses. She thought that if she could she might take away this summer day, this one day, for him; but he wouldn't have liked her to do that and she could not do it anyway. So instead she would make it, which she could do, this her anniversary day, a day of such perfect brilliance, a morning so new, an afternoon so endless, that the whole world would remember it ever after.

Once Upon a Time The lights of Edgewood which Smoky had left burning paled to nothing on that day; in the night that followed they shone again, and on every night thereafter. Rain and wind came in through the open windows, though, which they had forgotten to close; summer storms stained the drapes and the rugs, scattering papers, blowing shut the closet doors. Moths and bugs found holes in the screens, and died happily in union with the burning bulbs, or did not die but generated young in the rugs and tapestries. Autumn came, though it seemed impossible, a myth, a rumor not to be believed; fallen leaves piled up on the porches, blew in through the screen-door left unlatched, which beat helplessly against the wind and at last died on its hinges, no barrier any more. Mice discovered the kitchen; the cats had all left for more seemly circ.u.mstances, and the pantry was theirs, and the squirrels' who came after and nested in the musty beds. Still the orrery turned, mindlessly, cheerfully whirling, and still the house was lit up like a beacon or the entrance to a ballroom. In winter it shone its lights on snow, an ice palace; snow drifted in its rooms, snow capped its cold chimneys. The light over the porch went out.

That there was such a house in the world, lit and open and empty, became a story in those days; there were other stories, people were in motion, stories were all they cared to hear, stories were all they believed in, life had got that hard. The story of the house all lit, the house of four floors, seven chimneys, three hundred and sixtyfive stairs, fifty-two doors, traveled far; they were all travelers then. It met another story, a story about a world elsewhere, and a family whose names many knew, whose house had been large and popuious with griefs and happinesses that had once seemed endless, but had ended, or had stopped; and to those many who still dreamed of that family as often as of their own, the two stories seemed one. The house could be found. In spring the bas.e.m.e.nt lights went out, and one in the music-room.

People in motion; stories starting in a dream, and spoken by unwise actors into wanting ears, then ceasing; the story turning back to dream, and then haunting the day, told and retold. People knew there was a house made of time, and many set out to find it.

It could be found. There it was: at the end of a neglected drive, in a soft rain, not what had been expected at all and however long-sought always come upon unexpectedly, for all its lights; sagging porch steps to go up, and a door to go in by. Small animals who thought the place theirs, long in possession, sharing only with the wind and the weather. On the floor of the library, by a certain chair, face down at a certain page, a heavy book spine-broken and warped by dampness. And many other rooms, their windows filled with the rainy gardens, the Park, the aged trees indifferent and only growing older. And then many doors to choose from, a juncture of corridors, each one leading away, each ending in a door that could be gone out by; evening falling early, and a forgetfulness with it, which way was the way in, which now the way out?

Choose a door, take a step. Mushrooms have come out in the wetness, the walled garden is full of them. There are further lights, there in the twilit bottom of the garden; the door in the wall is open, and the silvery rain sifts over the Park that can just be seen through it. Whose dog is that?

One by one the bulbs burned out, like long lives come to their expected ends. Then there was a dark house made once of time, made now of weather, and harder to find; impossible to find and not even as easy to dream of as when it was alight. Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there was ever a time when there were pa.s.sages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn't as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never gra.s.s as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

JOHN CROWLEY came to New York City from the Midwest in 1964, and earned his living there in films and television. In 1977 he moved to the Berks.h.i.+re Hills of Ma.s.sachusetts, where he has lived in one small town or another writing novels. LITTLE, BIG, his fourth, was begun in New York in 1969 and finished in Lenox, Ma.s.sachusetts in 1978. He is 38.

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