Little, Big Part 15

"You bet."

She turned her back to him, pointing out on the figured bed-jacket where it hurt. "No no no honey," he said as though to a child. "Look. Lie down here. Put the pillow under your china"right. Now I sit herea"just move a littlea"let me take my shoes off. Comfy?" He began, feeling her fever-heat through the thin jacket. "That alb.u.m," he said, not having for a moment forgotten it.

"Oh," she said, her voice low and gruff as he pressed the bellows of her lungs. "Auberon's pictures." Her hand reached out and rested on the cover. "When we were kids. Art pictures."

"Art pictures like what?" George said, working the bones where her wings would he if she had wings.

As though she couldn't help it she raised the cover, put it down again. "He didn't know," she said. "He didn't think they were dirty. Oh, they're not." She opened the book. "Lower. There. Lower more."

"Oho," George said. George had once known these naked, pearl-gray children, abstracted here and more carnal for not being flesh at all. "Let's take this shirtie off," he said. "That's bettera ."

She turned the alb.u.m's pages with abstracted slowness, touching certain of the pictures as though she wished to feel the texture of the day, the past, the flesh.

Here were Alice and she on the stippled stones by a waterfall which plunged madly out-of-focus behind them. In the hazy foreground leaves, some law of optics inflated droplets of sunlight into dozens of white disembodied eyes round with wonder. The naked children (Sophie's dark aureoles were puckered like unblown flowers, like tiny closed lips) looked down into a black, silken pool. What did they see there that kept their lashy eyes lowered, that made them smile? Below the image, in a neat hand, was the picture's t.i.tle: August. Sophie's fingers traced the ray of lines where Alice's thigh creased at the pelvis, lines tender and finely-drawn as though her skin were thinner then than it would become. Her silver calves lay together, and her long-toed feet, as though they were beginning to be changed into a mermaid's tail.

Small pictures clipped to the pages with black corners. Sophie wide-eyed, open-mouthed, feet wide apart and arms high, all open, a Gnostic's X of microcosmic child-woman-kind, her yet-uncut hair wide too and whitea"thus golden in facta"against an obscure cave of summer-dark trees. Alice undressing, stepping one-footed from her white cotton panties, her plump purse already beginning to be clothed with crisp fair hair. The two girls opening through time like the magic flowers of nature films as George hungrily looked through Auberon's eyes, double-peeping at the past. Stop here a minute. a She held the page open there, while he went on, shifting his position and his hands; her legs opening across the sheets made a certain sound. She showed him the Orphan Nymphs. Flowers twined in their hair, they lay full length entwined on the gra.s.sy sward. They had their hands to each other's cheeks, and their eyes were heavy and they were on the point of kissing open-mouthed: acting out lonely consolation, it might be, for an art-picture of innocence at once orphaned and faery, but not acting; Sophie remembered. Her nerveless hand slipped from the page and her eyes too lost their grasp of it; it didn't matter.

"Do you know what I'm going to do," George asked, unable not to.

"Uh-huh."

"Do you?"

"Yes." An exhalation only. "Yes."

But she didn't, not really; she had leapt across that gap Consciousness again, had saved herself from falling there, had landed safely (able to fly) on the far side, within that pearl-toned afternoon that had no night.

The Least Trumps "As in any deck," Cloud said, taking their velvet bag from the tooled case and then the cards themselves from the bag, "there are fifty-two cards for the fifty-two weeks of the year, four suits for the four seasons, twelve court cards for the twelve months and, if you count them right, three hundred and sixty-four pips for the days of the year."

"A year's got three-sixty-five," George said.

"This is the old year, before they knew better. Throw another log on the fire, will you, George?"

She began to lay out his future as he fooled with the fire. The secret he had within hima"or above him asleep actuallya" warmed his center and made him grin, but left his extremities deathly cold. He unrolled the cuffs of his sweater and drew his hands within. They felt like a skeleton's.

"Also," said Cloud, "there are twenty-one trumps, numbered from zero to twenty. There are Persons, and Places, and Things, and Notions." The big cards fell, with their pretty emblems of sticks and cups and swords. "There's another set of trumps," Cloud said. "The ones I have here are not as great as those; those have oh the sun and the moon and large notions. Mine are calleda"my mother called thema"the Least Trumps." She smiled at George. "Here is a Person. The Cousin." She placed that in the circle and thought a moment.

"Tell me the worst," George said. "I can take it."

"The worst," said Daily Alice from the deep armchair where she sat reading, "is just what she can't tell you."

"Or the best either," said Cloud. "Just a bit of what might be. But in the next day, or the next year, or the next hour, that I can't tell either. Now hush while I think." The cards had grown into interlocking circles like trains of thought, and Cloud spoke to George of events that would befall him; a small legacy, she said, from someone he never knew, but not money, and left him by accident. "You see, here's the Gift; here the Stranger in this place."

Watching her, chuckling at the process and also helplessly at what had occurred to him that afternoon (and which he intended to repeat, creeping quiet as a mouse when all were asleep), George didn't notice Cloud fall silent before the completing pattern; didn't see her lips purse or her hand hesitate as she placed the last card in the center. It was a Place: the Vista.

"Well?" George said.

"George," she said, "I don't know."

"Don't know what?"

"Exactly." She reached for her box of cigarettes, shook it and found it empty. She had seen so many displays, so many possible falls had grown into her consciousness that sometimes they overlapped; with a sense like deja vu, she felt she was looking not at a single arrangement but at one of a series, as though some old display she had made were to be labeled "Continued," and here, without warning, was the continuation. Yet it was all George's fall too, "If," she said, "the Cousin card is you." No. That wouldn't do. There was something, some fact she didn't know.

George of course knew what it was, and felt a sudden strangulation, a fear of discovery absurd on the face of it but intense anyway, as though he had walked into a trap. "Well," he said, finding voice. "That's enough anyway. I'm not sure I want to know my every future move." He saw Cloud touch the Cousin card; then the Thing called Seed. Oh Christ, he thought; and just then the station wagon's hoa.r.s.e horn was heard in the drive.

"They'll need help unloading," Daily Alice said, struggling to rise from the grasp of her armchair. George jumped up. "No no, honey, oh no, not in your condition. You sit tight." He went from the room, cold hands thrust in his sleeves like a monk.

Alice laughed and picked up her book again. "Did you scare him, Cloud? What did you see?"

Cloud only looked down at the pattern she had made.

For some time now she had begun to think she had been wrong about the Least Trumps, that they were not telling her of the small events of lives close to her-or rather that those small events were parts of chains, and the chains were great events; very great indeed.

The Vista card in the center of her pattern showed a meeting of corridors or aisles. Down each corridor was an endless vista of doorways, each one different, an arch then a lintel then pillars and so on till the artist's invention ran out and the fineness of his woodcutting (which was very fine) could no longer make distinctions. You could see, down those aisles, other doors which led off in other directions, perhaps each showing vistas as endless and various as this one.

A juncture, doorways, turnings, a moment only when all the ways could be seen at once. This was Georgea"all this. He was that vista, though he didn't know it and she couldn't think how to tell him. The vista wasn't his: he was the vista. It was she who looked down it at the possibilities. And could not express them. She only knewa"for sure nowa"that all the patterns she had ever cast were parts of one pattern, and that George had done or would doa"or was at that moment doinga"something that made an element in that pattern. And in any pattern, the elements do not stand alone; they are repeated, they are linked. What could it be?

Around her in the house the sounds of her family came, calling and hauling and treading the stairs. But it was into this place that she stared, into the prospect of endless branchings, corners, corridors. She felt that perhaps she was in that place; that there was a door just behind her, that she sat here between it and the first of the doors pictured on the card; that if she turned her head she might see an endless prospect of arch and lintel behind her too.

Only Fair All night especially in cold weather the house was accustomed to speak softly to itself, perhaps because of its hundreds of joints and its half-floors and its stone parts piled on wooden. It tocked and groaned, grunted and squeaked; something gave way in an attic and fell, which caused something to come loose in a cellar and drop. The squirrels in the airs.p.a.ces scratched and the mice explored the walls and halls. One mouse late at night went on tiptoe, a bottle of gin under his arm and a finger on his lips, trying to remember where Sophie's room might be. He nearly tripped on an unexpected step; all steps in this house were unexpected.

Within his head it was still noon. The Pellucidar had not worn off, but it had turned evil, as it will do, not prodding flesh and consciousness any the less, but now with a cruel malice and not in fun. His flesh was contracted and defensive and he doubted that it would uncoil even for Sophie supposing he could find her. Ah: the lamp over a painting had been left on, and by it he saw the doork.n.o.b he wanted, he was sure of it. He was about to step quickly to it when it turned, spookily; he stepped back into the shadows, and the door opened. Smoky came out, an old dressing gown over his shoulders (the kind, George noticed, that has a braided edge of dark and light hues around the collar and pocket) and shut the door carefully and silently. He stood for a moment then, and seemed to sigh; then he went off around the corner.

Wrong d.a.m.n door, George thought; imagine if I'd gone into their room, or is it the kids' room? He went away, utterly confused now, searching hopelessly through the coiled nautilus of the second floor, tempted once to go down a floor; maybe in his madness he had gotten onto a matching upper floor and forgotten he had done so. Then Somehow he found himself in front of a door that Reason told him must be hers, though other senses disputed it. He opened it in some fear and stepped inside.

Tacey and Lily lay sweetly asleep beneath the sloping ceiling of a dormer room. By the nightlight he could see spectral toys, the glittering eye of a bear. The two girls, one still in a jailhouse crib, didn't stir, and he was about to shut the door on them when he knew there was someone else in the room, near Tacey's bed. Someone a He peered around the edge of the door.

Someone had just drawn from within the fine folds of his night-gray cloak a night-gray bag. George couldn't see his face for the wide Spanish night-gray hat he wore. He stepped to the crib where Lily lay, and with fingers clothed in night-gray gloves took from his bag a pinch of something, which delicately he dispensed from between thumb and finger above her sleeping face. Sand descended in a dull-gold trickle to her eyes. He turned away then and was putting away his bag when he seemed to sense George turned to stone at the doorway. He glanced at him over the tall collar of his cloak, and George looked into his placid, heavy-lidded, night-gray eyes. Those eyes regarded him for a moment with something like pity, and he shook his heavy head, as who should say Nothing for you, son; not tonight. Which was after all only fair. And then he turned around, the ta.s.sel swinging on his hat, and went away with a low snap of his cloak to elsewhere and others more deserving.

So when George at last found his own cheerless bed (in the imaginary bedroom as it happened) he lay sleepless for hours, his withered eyeb.a.l.l.s starting from his head. He cradled the gin bottle in his arms, tugging now and again at its cold and acid comfort, the night and day growing confused and raggedy on the still-burning Catherine-wheel of his consciousness. Only he did come to understand that the first room he had tried to enter, the one he saw Smoky come out of, was indeed Sophie's, had to be. The shudder-starting rest of it dissolved as the sparkling synapses one by one mercifully began to b.u.m out.

Toward dawn he watched it begin to snow.

Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest, The milkie way, the bird of Paradise, Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls blood, The land of spices; something understood.

a"George Herbert Christmas," said Doctor Drinkwater as his red-cheeked face sped smoothly toward Smoky's, "is a kind of day, like no other in the year, that doesn't seem to succeed the days it follows, if you see what I mean." He came close to Smoky in a long, expert circle and slid away. Smoky, jerking forward and backward, hands not neatly clasped behind like Doc's but extended, feeling the air, thought he saw. Daily Alice, whose hands were inside an old tatty m.u.f.f, went by him smoothly, glancing once at his unprogress and making, just to be mean, a laughing, swooping figure as she went away, which was however outside his ken, since his eyes couldn't seem to leave his own feet.

Agreement with Newton "I mean," Doctor Drinkwater said, reappearing beside him, "that every Christmas seems to follow immediately after the last one; all the months that came between don't figure in. Christmases succeed each other, not the falls they follow."

"That's right," said Mother, making stately progress around. Behind her, like the wooden ducklings attached to wooden ducks, she drew her two granddaughters. "It seems you just get through one and there's another."

"Mmm," said Doc. "Not what I meant exactly." He veered off like a fighter plane, and slipped an arm through Sophie's arm. "How's every little thing," Smoky heard him say, and heard her laugh before they swept off, listing both together.

"Getting better every year," Smoky said, and suddenly turned around involuntarily. He was back in Daily Alice's path, collision course, nothing he could do. He wished he'd strapped a pillow to his a.s.s as they do in comic postcards. Alice grew large, and halted abruptly and expertly.

"Do you think Tacey and Lily should go in?" she said.

"I leave that up to you." Mother drew them past again on their sled; their round, fur-circled faces were bright as berries; then they were gone again, and so was Alice. Let the womenfolk consult, he thought. He had to master the simple forward progress; they were making him dizzy, appearing and disappearing like that. "Woops," he said, and would have lost it, but Sophie appearing suddenly behind him bore him up, propelled him forward. "How have you been?" he said nonchalantly; it seemed the thing, to greet each other as they all went around.

"Unfaithful," she said; the cold word made a small cloud on the air.

Smoky's left ankle buckled, and his right runner just then sped away on its own. He spun around and landed hard on the ice, on the rudimentary tail so vulnerable on one so fleshless behind. Sophie was circling him, her laughter almost making her fall too.

Just sit here a while till my tail freezes up, Smoky thought. Sit gripped in ice like the feet of bushes until some thaw comesa .

The previous week's snow had not cleaved to earth, it was a night's fall only, the rain returned heavily the next morning and George Mouse went sloshing off in it hollow-eyed and confused, having caught, they all thought, Sophie's bug. The rain continued like una.s.suageable grief, flooding the low broad lawn where the sphinxes decayed mumchance. Then the temperature tumbled, and Christmas Eve morning the world was all iron-gray and glaring in ice, all the color of the iron-gray sky where the sun made a white smear only behind the clouds. The lawn was hard enough to skate on; the house looked like a miniature house for a model railroad, set beside a pond made from a compact-mirror.

Still Sophie circled him. He said: "What do you mean? Unfaithful?"

She only smiled secretly and helped him up, then turned and with some occult motion he saw but could never copy whispered away effortlessly.

He'd do better if he could figure out how the others got around that unalterable law which said that if one skate slid forward, the other had to slide backward. It seemed he could zip zip back and forth in one place forever and be the only one here in agreement with Newton. Till he fell down. There is no perpetual motion. Yet just at that moment he began Somehow to get it, and, numbb.u.mmed, made his way across the ice to the steps of the porch, where Cloud sat in state on a fur rug guarding the boots and the thermos.

"So where's this promised snow?" he said, and Cloud displayed her own brand of secret smile. He wrung the neck of the thermos and decapitated it. He poured lemon tea charged with rum into one of the nested cups the cap contained, and one for Cloud. He drank, the steam melting the cold in his nostrils. He felt bleakly, recklessly dissatisfied. Unfaithful! Was that some kind of joke? The jewel of great price which he had had from Daily Alice long ago, in the midst of their first embrace, darkened as pearls can do and turned to nothing when he tried to hang it on Sophie's throat. He never knew what Sophie felt, but couldn't believe, though he'd learned it to be so of Daily Alice, that Sophie didn't know either: that she was torn, bewildered, and withal half-dreaming as much as he. So he only watched her come and go with seeming purpose, and wondered, imagined, supposed.

She came across the lawn with her hands behind her back, then made a foot-across-foot turn and sailed up to the porch. She turned just where the frozen pond ran out, and engraved the ice with a small shower of crystals when she stopped. She sat beside Smoky and took his cup from him, her breath quick with exertion. In her hair Smoky noticed something, a tiny flower, or a jewel made to look like one; he looked closer and saw it was a snowflake, so whole and perfect he could count its arms and tell its parts. As he was saying "A snowflake," another fell beside it, and another.

Letters to Santa Different families have different methods, at Christmas, of communicating their wishes to Santa. Many send letters, mailing them early and addressing them to the North Pole. These never arrive, postmasters having their own whimsical ways of dealing with them, none involving, delivery.

Another method, which the Drinkwaters had always used though no one could remember how they had hit on it, was to b.u.m their missives in the study fireplace, the tiled one whose blue scenes of skaters, windmills, trophies of the hunt seemed most appropriate, and whose chimney was the highest. The smoke then (the children always insisted on running out to see) vanished into the North, or at least into the atmosphere, for Santa to decipher. A complex procedure, but it seemed to work, and was always done on Christmas Eve when wishes were sharpest.

Secrecy was important, at least for the grown-ups' letters; the kids could never resist telling everybody what they wanted and for Lily and Tacey the letters had to be written by others anyway, and they had to be reminded of the many wishes they'd had as Christmas neared but which had grown small in the interim and slipped through the coa.r.s.e seine of young desire. Don't you want a brother for Teddy (a bear)? Do you still want a shotgun like Grampa's? Ice skates with double blades?

But the grown-ups could presumably decide these things for themselves.

In the expectant, crackling afternoon of that Eve of ice Daily Alice drew her knees up within a huge armchair and used a folded checkerboard resting on her knees for a desk. "Dear Santa," she wrote, "please bring me a new hot-water bottle, any color but that pink that looks like boiled meat, a jade ring like the one my great-aunt Cloud has, for the right middle finger." She thought. She watched the snow fall on the gray world, still just visible as day died. "A quilted robe," she wrote; "one that comes down to my feet. A pair of fuzzy slippers. I would like this baby to be easier than the other two to have. The other stuff is not so important if you could manage that. Ribbon candy is nice, and you can't find it anywhere any more. Thanking you in advance, Alice Barnable (the older sister)." Since childhood she had always added that, to avoid confusion. She hesitated over the tiny blue notepaper nearly filled with these few desires. "P.S.," she wrote. "If you could bring my sister and my husband back from wherever it is they've gone off together I would be more grateful than I could say. ADB."

She folded this absently. Her father's typewriter could be heard in the strange snow-silence. Cloud, cheek in hand, wrote with the stub of a pencil at the drum-table, her eyes moist, perhaps with tears, though her eyes often seemed bedimmed lately; old age only, probably. Alice rested her head back against the chair's soft breast, looking upward.

Above her, Smoky charged with rum-tea sat down in the imaginary study to begin his letter. He spoiled one sheet because the rickety writing-table there rocked beneath his careful pen; he shimmed the leg with a matchbook and began again.

"My dear Santa, First of all it's only right that I explain about last year's wish. I won't excuse myself by saying I was a little drunk, though I was, and I am (it's getting to be a Christmas habit, as everything about Christmas gets to be a habit, but you know all about that). Anyway, ill shocked you or strained your powers by such a request I'm sorry; I meant only to be flip and let off a little steam. I know (I mean I a.s.sume) it's not in your power to give one person to another, but the fact is my wish was granted. Maybe only because I wanted it then more than anything, and what you want so much you're just likely to get. So I don't know whether to thank you or not. I mean I don't know whether you're responsible; and I don't know whether I'm grateful."

He chewed the end of his pen for a moment, thinking of last Christmas morning when he had gone into Sophie's room to wake her, so early (Tacey wouldn't wait) that blank nighttime still ruled the windows. He wondered if he should relate the story. He'd never told anyone else, and the deep privacy of this about-to-becremated letter tempted him to confidences. But no.

It was true what Doc had said, that Christmas succeeds Christmas rather than the days it follows. That had become apparent to Smoky in the last few days. Not because of the repeated ritual, the tree sledded home, the antique ornaments lovingly brought out, the Druid greenery hung on the lintels. It was only since last Christmas that all that had become imbued for him with dense emotion, an emotion having nothing to do with Yuletide, a day which for him as a child had had nothing like the fascination of Hallowe'en, when he went masked and recognizable (pirate, clown) in the burnt and smoky night. Yet he saw that it was an emotion that would cover him now, as with snow, each time this season came. She was the cause, not he to whom he wrote.

"Anyway," he began again, "my desires this year are a little clouded. I would like one of those instruments you use to sharpen the blades of an old-fashioned lawn mower. I would like the missing volume of Gibbon (Vol. II) which somebody's apparently taken out to use as a doorstop or something and lost." He thought of listing publisher and date, but a feeling of futility and silence came over him, drifting deep. "Santa," he wrote, "I would like to be one person only, not a whole crowd of them, half of them always trying to turn their backs and run whenever somebody"a"Sophie, he meant, Alice, Cloud, Doc, Mother; Alice most of alla""looks at me. I want to be brave and honest and shoulder my burdens. I don't want to leave myself out while a bunch of slyboots figments do my living for me." He stopped, seeing he was growing unintelligible. He hesitated over the complimentary close; he thought of using "Yours as ever," but thought that might sound ironic or sneering, and at last wrote only "Yours c.," as his father always had, which then seemed ambiguous and cool; what the h.e.l.l anyway; and he signed it: Evan S. Barnable.

Down in the study they had gathered with eggnog and their letters. Doc had his folded like true correspondence, its backside pimpled with hard-struck punctuation; Mother's was torn from a brown bag, like a shopping list. The fire took them all, thougha"rejecting only Lily's at first, who tried with a shriek to throw it in the fire's mouth, you can't really throw a piece of paper, she'd learn that as she grew in grace and wisdoma"and Tacey insisted they go out to see. Smoky took her by the hand, and lifted Lily onto his shoulders, and they went out into the snowfall made spectral by the house's lights to watch the smoke go away, melting the falling snowflakes as it rose.

When he received these communications, Santa drew the claws of his spectacles from behind his ears and pressed the sore place on the bridge of his nose with thumb and finger. What was it they expected him to do with these? A shotgun, a bear, snowshoes, some pretty things and some useful: well, all right. But for the rest of it a He just didn't know what people were thinking anymore. But it was growing late; if they, or anyone else, were disappointed in him tomorrow, it wouldn't be the first time. He took his furred hat from its peg and drew on his gloves. He went out, already unaccountably weary though the journey had not even begun, into the multicolored arctic waste beneath a decillion stars, whose near brilliance seemed to chime, even as the harness of his reindeer chimed when they raised their s.h.a.ggy heads at his approach, and as the eternal snow chimed too when he trod it with his booted feet.

Room for One More Soon after that Christmas, Sophie began to feel as though her body were being unwrapped and repacked in a completely different way, a set of sensations that was vertiginous at first when she didn't suspect its cause, and then interesting, awesome even, when she did, and at last (later on, when the process was completed and the new tenant fully installed and making itself at home) comfortable: deeply so at times, like a new kind of sweet sleep; yet expectant too. Expectant! The right word.

There wasn't much her father could say when eventually Sophie's condition was admitted to him, he being just such a one as she carried himself. Being a father, he had to go through motions of solemnity that never quite amounted to censure, and there was never any question of What was to be Done with Ita"he shuddered to think what would have happened if anyone had thought that kind of thought when he was growing inside Amy Meadows.

"Well, my G.o.d, there's room for one more," Mother said, drying a tear. "It's not like it was the first time it ever happened in the world." Like the rest of them, she wondered who the father was, but Sophie wasn't saying, or rather in her smallest voice and with eyes downcast, was saying she wouldn't say. And so the matter had eventually to be dropped.

Though of course Daily Alice had to be told.

It was to Daily Alice that she took her news first, or next to first; her news, and her secret.

"Smoky," she said.

"Oh, Sophie," Alice said. "No."

"Yes," she said, defiant by the door of Alice's room, unwilling to enter further in.