Little, Big Part 14

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

"Ain't misbehavin'," Smoky sang in a dreamy, effete falsetto, "savin' all my love for you."

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

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

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

"That's right," Grandfather Trout seemed gloomily to reply. "Contradict your elders, think you know better."

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

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

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

Come, let me see thee sink into a dream Of quiet thoughts, protracted till thine eye Be calm as water when the winds are gone And no one can tell whither.

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

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

"Oh my G.o.d."

"Yes."

"Time flies."

"Well, come in. What's up? You should have written."

"Didn't decide till this morning."

"Any reason?"

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

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

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

"Time flies," he said.

A Definite Hazard In the parlor, they were all preparing a long shopping list. "Peanut b.u.t.ter," Mother said, "stamps, iodine, soda-watera"lots of it, soap pads, raisins, tooth powder; chutney, chewing gum, candles, George!" She embraced him; Doctor Drinkwater looked up from the list he was making.

"h.e.l.lo, George," said Cloud from her corner by the fire. "Don't forget cigarettes."

"Paper diapers, the cheap ones," Daily Alice said. "Matchesa"Tampaxa"3-in-One Oil."

"Oatmeal," Mother said. "How are your people, George?"

"No oatmeal!" Tacey said.

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

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

"Somebody sick?" George asked.

"Sophie's got this strange fever," Daily Alice said. "It comes and goes."

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

"I hope they'll be careful," Cloud said. "It's very wet."

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

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

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

"No but really," George said. "How's it going?"

"Slate junco," Smoky said. "Good. Good." He sighed. "It's just hard when winter comes."

"G.o.d, yes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You don't mean it," George said.

"I think so," Alice said. She bit the bun. "I'm a good bearer."

"Wow. A boy this time."

"No," she said confidently. "Another girl. So Cloud says.

"Not I," Cloud said. "The cards."

"We'll name her Lucy," Tacey said. "Lucy Ann and Anndy Ann de Barn Barn Barnable. George has two moustaches."

"Who'll take this up to Sophie?" Cloud said, setting a cup and a bun on a black j.a.panned tray of great age that showed a silver-haired, star-spangled sprite drinking c.o.ke.

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

"Sure, George. I think you're included."

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

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

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

"Feeling better?"

"I don't know. I was dreaming. Cocoa for me?"

"For you. What were you dreaming?'

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

"Dirty."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Sure," George said. "Fever dreams."

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

"You need a ma.s.sage." Did his voice betray him?

She bent her long torso side to side. "Would you?"