Little, Big Part 26

The Worm Turned Lilac saw sunset elsewhere.

"Magnificent!" Mrs. Underhill said. "And terrifying. Doesn't it make your heart beat high?"

"But it's all made of cloud," Lilac said.

"Hush, dear," Mrs. Underhill said. "Someone's feelings could be hurt."

Made of sunset was more correct: all of it, the thousand striped war-tents obscured in the wreathing smokes of orange watch' fires, and their curling pennants striped the same in sunset colors; the black lines of horse or foot or both, picked out with silver weaponglint, that receded as far as the eye could see; the bright coats of captains and the dark gray of guns being drawn up under their command against empurpled harricadoesa"the whole vast encampment, or was it a great flotilla of galleons, armed and under sail?

"A thousand years," Mrs. Underhill said grimly. "Defeats, retreats, rear-guard actions. But no more. Soon a" The k.n.o.bby stick was under her arm like a commander's baton, her long chin was held high. "See?" she said. "There! Isn't he brave?"

A figure, burdened with armor and with weighty responsibilities, walked the p.o.o.p, or toured the breastworks; wind stirred his white whiskers as long almost as himself. The Generalissimo of all this. In one hand he held a wand; just then, the sunset altered, the tip of the wand caught fire. He gestured with it toward where the touch-holes on his guns would be, had they been guns, but then thought better of it. He lowered the wand, and it went out. From his broad belt he drew out a folded map, unfolded it, peered nearsightedly at it for some time, then refolded it, replaced it, and took up his heavy tread again.

"The die's cast now," Mrs. Underhill said. "No more retreating. The worm's turned."

"If you don't mind," the stork said, her voice faint between labored pants, "this alt.i.tude's too much for me."

"Sorry," Mrs. Underhill said. "All done now."

"Storks," the stork panted, "are accustomed to sit down, once a league or so."

"Don't sit down there," Lilac said. "You'll sink right through."

"Downward then," Mrs. Underhill said. The stork ceased to pump her short wings, and began to descend, with a sigh of relief. The Generalissimo, hands on his gunwales or his machicolated belvedere, stared eagle-eyed into the distance, but failed to see Mrs. Underhill salute him smartly as they pa.s.sed.

"Oh, well," she said. "He's as brave as they come, and it's a fine show."

"It's a fake," Lilac said. It had already shape-shifted into something even more harmless as they sank.

Curse the child, Mrs. Underhill thought irritably. It was convincing, convincing enougha . Well. Perhaps they oughtn't to have entrusted it all to that Prince: he was just too old. But there it is, she thought: we're all old, all too old. Could it be they had waited too long, been too long patient, retreated one final furlong too many? She could only hope that, when the time at last came, the old fool's guns would not all misfire, would at least give heart to their friends and frighten briefly those on whom they were trained.

Too old, too old. For the first time she felt that the outcome of it all, which could not be in doubt, could not, was in doubt. Well, it would all be over soon. Did not this day, this very evening, mark the beginning of the last long vigil, the last watch, before the forces were at last joined? "Now that's the tour I promised you," she said over her shoulder to Lilac. "And now a"

"Aw," Lilac said.

"With no complaints a"

"Aaaawww a"

"We'll take our nap."

Lilac's long-drawn note of complaint altered, surprisingly, in her throat, to something else, a sudden mouth-opening thing that stole over her like a spirit. It went on opening her mouth wider and widera"she hadn't thought it could open so widea"and made her eyes close and water, and sucked a long draft of air into her lungs, which expanded with a will of their own to take it in, Then, just as suddenly, the spirit was gone, releasing her jaws and letting her exhale.

She blinked, smacking her lips, wondering what it was.

"Sleepy," said Mrs. Underhill.

For Lilac had just yawned her first yawn. Her second came soon after. She put her cheek against the rough stuff of Mrs. Underhill's broad cloak, and, Somehow no longer unwilling, closed her eyes.

Hidden Ones Revealed When he was very young, Auberon had begun a collection of postmarks. On a trip with Doc to the post office in Meadowbrook, he had begun idly examining the wastebaskets, having nothing else to do, and had immediately come up with two treasures: envelopes from places that seemed fantastically distant to him, and looking remarkably crisp for having come so far.

It soon developed into a small pa.s.sion, like Lily's for bird's nests. He insisted on accompanying whoever was traveling near a post office; he conned his friends' mail; he gloated over distant cities, far states whose names begin with I, and, rarest of all, names from across the sea.

Then one day Joy Flowers, whose granddaughter had lived abroad for a year, gave him a fat brown bag full of envelopes sent her from every part of the world. He could hardly find on the map a place which had nOt stamped its name on one of these pieces of blue flimsy. Some of them came from places so distant they weren't even in the alphabet he knew. And at a stroke his collection was complete, and his pleasure in it over. No discovery he could make in Meadowbrook's post office could add to it. He never looked at it again.

It was the same with old Auberon's photographs, when at last young Auberon discovered them to be more than a record of a large family's long life. Beginning with the last, of a beardless Smoky in a white suit beside the birdbath made of dwarves which still stood by the Summer House door, he had dipped tentatively, then sorted curiously, and at last hunted greedily through the thousands of pictures big and small, elated with wonder and horror (here! Here was the secret, the hidden ones revealed, each image worth a thousand words) and for a week was almost unable to speak to his family for fear of revealing what he had learneda"or rather thought he was about to learn.

For in the end the pictures illuminated nothing, because nothing illuminated them.

"Note thumb," old Auberon would write on the back of a dim view of gray and black shrubbery. And there was, in the undisentanglable convolvulus, something that looked very much like a thumb. Good. Evidence. Another, though, would annul this evidence entirely, because (with only speechless exclamation marks on its back) here was an entire figure, a ghostly little miss in the leaves, with a trailing skirt of dew-glistening cobweb, pretty as a picture; and in the foreground, out of focus, the excited figure of a blond human child looking at the camera and pointing out the wee stranger. Now who could believe that? And if it was true (it couldn't be, how it had been faked Auberon had no idea, but it was just too stupidly real not to be fake) then what good was the maybe-a-thumb-in-the-shrubbery and a thousand others just as obscure? When he had sorted a dozen boxes into the few impossible and the many unintelligible, and saw that there were dozens of boxes and portfolios yet to go, he shut them all up (with a mixed sense of relief and loss) and rarely thought about them again.

He never again opened the old five-year diary in which his own notes had been made either, after that. He returned the last edition of the Architecture of Country Houses to its place in the library. His own humble discoveries, or what had seemed like discoveriesa"the orrery, a few interesting slips of the tongue made by his great-aunt and his grandmothera"heart-startling as they had once seemed, had been swamped by the thick flood of torturous pictures and worse notes on them which his namesake had made. He forgot about it all. His secret-agentry was over.

His secret-agentry was over, but he had by this time gone so long in disguise indetectably as a member of his family that by slow stages he had actually become one. (It often happens so with secret agents.) The secret that was not revealed in Auberon's photographs lay, if it lay anywhere, in the hearts of his relatives; and Auberon had for so long pretended to know what they all knew (so that they would reveal it to him by accident) that he came to suppose he did know it as well as any of them; and like his evidences, and about the same time, he forgot about it. And since, if they had ever really known anything that he didn't know, they too had all forgotten it or seemed to have forgotten it, then they were all equal and he was one of them. He even felt, just below consciousness, that he was aligned with all the rest of them in a conspiracy that excluded only his father: Smoky didn't know, and didn't know they knew he didn't know. Somehow, rather than separating them from him, this joined them to Smoky all the more, as though they kept from him the secret of a surprise party planned for Smoky himself. And so for a while Auberon's relations with his father grew a little easier.

But even though he stopped scrutinizing others' motives and movements, a habit of secrecy about his own persisted in Auberon. He often put false faces over his actions, for no good reason. Certainly it wasn't to mystify; even as a secret agent he hadn't wanted to mystify anybody, a secret agent's task is just the reverse of that. If he had a reason at all, it may have been only a desire to present himself in a milder, clearer light than he might otherwise have appeared in: milder and clearer than the dim-flaring lamps by which he perceived himself.

"Where are you off to in such a tear?" Daily Alice asked him as he wolfed his milk and cookies at the kitchen table after school. He was in this autumn the last Barnable still a scholar in Smoky's school. Lucy had stopped going the year before.

"Play ball," he said, his mouth full. "With John Wolf and those guys."

"Oh." She half-refilled the gla.s.s he held out to her. Good lord he had gotten big lately. "Well, tell John to tell his mother I'll be over tomorrow with some soup and things, and see what she needs." Auberon kept his eyes on his cookies. "Is she feeling any better, do you know?" He shrugged. "Tacey said a oh, well." It seemed unlikely from Auberon's air that he would go tell John Wolf that Tacey had said his mother was dying. Probably her simple message wouldn't even be pa.s.sed. But she couldn't be sure. "What do you play?"

"Catcher," he said quickly. "Usually."

"I was a catcher," Alice said. "Usually."

Auberon put down the gla.s.s, slowly, thinking. "Do you think," he said, "that people are happier when they're alone, or with other people?"

She carried his gla.s.s and plate to the sink. "I don't know," she said. "I guess a Well, what do you think?"

"I don't know," he said. "I just wondered if a" What he wondered was whether it was a fact everyone knew, every grown-up anyway: that everyone is of course happiest alone, or the reverse, whichever it was. "I guess I'm happier with other people," he said.

"Oh yes?" She smiled; since she faced the sink, he couldn't see her. "That's nice," she said. "An extrovert."

"I guess."

"Well," Alice said softly, "I just hope you don't creep back in your sh.e.l.l again."

He was already on his way out, stuffing extra cookies in his pockets, and didn't stop, but a strange window had suddenly been flung open within him. Sh.e.l.l? Had he been in a sh.e.l.l? Anda"odder stilla"had he been seen to be in one, was it common knowledge? He looked through this window and saw himself for a moment, for the first time, as others saw him. Meanwhile his feet had taken him out the broad swinging doors of the kitchen, which grump-grumped behind him in their way, and through the raisin-odorous pantry, and out through the stillness of the long dining room, going toward his imaginary ball-game.

Alice at the sink looked up, and saw an autumn leaf blown by the cas.e.m.e.nt, and called out to Auberon. She could hear his footsteps receding (his feet had grown even faster than the rest of him) and she picked up his jacket from the chair where he had left it, and went after him.

He was gone out of sight on his bike by the time she got out the front door. She called again, going down the porch stairs; and then noticed that she was outdoors, for the first time that day, and that the air was clear and tangy and large, and that she was aimless. She looked around herself. She could just see, extending beyond the corner of the house, a bit of the walled garden around the other side. On the stone ornament at its corner a crow was perched. It looked at her looking around herselfa"she couldn't remember ever having seen one so close to the house before, they were fearless but warya"and flopped from its perch, and flapped with heavy wings away over the park. Cras, cras: that's what Smoky said crows say in Latin. Cras, cras: "tomorrow, tomorrow."

She walked around the walled garden. Its little arched door stood ajar, inviting her in, but she didn't go in. She went around to the funny little walk bordered by hydrangeas that had once been in training to be ornamental shrubs, tall and orderly and cabbage-headed, but which had declined over the years into mere hydrangeas, and smothered the walk they were supposed to border, and obscured the view they were supposed to exhibit: two Doric pillars, leading to the path that went up the Hill. Still aimless, Alice walked along that walk (brushing from the last hydrangea blossoms a shower of papery petals like faded confetti) and started up the Hill.

Glory Auberon circled back along the road that ran around Edgewood's guardian stone wall, and at a certain point, dismounted. He climbed the wall (a fallen tree there and a weedy hummock on the other side made a stile) and hauled his bike over, wheeled it through the rustling gilded beechwood to the path, mounted again, and, glancing behind him, rode to the Summer House. He concealed the bike in the shed old Auberon had built.

The Summer House, warmed by September sun poured in through its big windows, was still and dusty. On the table where once his diary and spying equipment had lain, and where later he had sorted through Auberon's pictures, there lay now a ma.s.s of scribbled-over papers, the sixth volume of Gregorovius's Medieval Rome, a few other large books, and a map of Europe.

Auberon studied the top sheet, which he had written the day before: The scene is in the Emperor's tent outside Iconium. The Emperor is seated alone in an X-kind of chair. His sword is across his knees. He is wearing his armor but some of it has been taken off, and a servant is slowly polishing it, and sometimes he looks at the Emperor, but the emperor just looks straight ahead and doesn't notice him. The emperor looks tired.

He considered this, and then mentally crossed out the last sentence. Tired wasn't what he meant at all. Anybody can look tired. The Emperor Frederick Barbarossa on the eve of his last battle looked a well, what? Auberon uncapped his pen, thought, and recapped it again.

His play or screenplay (it might end up either, or be transmogrified into a novel) about the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa had in it Saracens and papal armies, Sicilian guerillas and potent paladins and princesses too. A congeries of romantic place-names where battles were fought by mobs of romantic personages. But what Auberon loved in these doings wasn't anything that could be called romantic. In fact all that he wrote was only to bring forth that figure, that single figure on a chair: a figure seen in a moment of repose s.n.a.t.c.hed between two desperate actions, exhausted after victory or defeat, hard clothes stained with war and wear. Above all it was a gaze: a calm, appraising look, without illusions, the look of someone coming to see that the odds against a course of action were insurmountable but the pressures to execute it irresistible. He was indifferent to the weather around him, and as Auberon described it, it was like him: harsh, indifferent, without warmth. His landscape was empty, save for a far tower with an aspect like his own, and perhaps a distant m.u.f.fled rider bearing news.

Auberon had a name for all this: Glory. If it wasn't what was meant by Glory, he didn't care. His plota"who was to be master, that's alla"didn't really much interest him; he was never able to grasp just what the Pope and Barbarossa were arguing about anyway. If someone had asked him (but no one would, his project had been begun in secrecy and years later would be burned in secrecy) what it was that had drawn him to this particular emperor, he wouldn't have been able to say. A harsh ring in the name. The picture of him old, mounted, armed, on his last futile crusade (all crusades were futile to young Auberon). And then swept away by chance in that armor under the waters of a nameless Armenian river when his charger shied in the middle of the ford. Glory.

"The Emperor doesn't look tired exactly, but a"

He marked this out too, angrily, and recapped his pen again. His huge ambition to delineate seemed suddenly insupportable, as though he might weep that he had to bear it alone.

I just hope you don't creep back into your sh.e.l.l.

But he had worked so hard to make that sh.e.l.l look just like him. He thought everyone had been fooled, and they hadn't been.

Dust swam in the sunlight still being cast into weighty blocks by the windows of the Summer House, but the place was growing chilly. Auberon put his pen away. Behind him on the shelves, old Auberon's boxes and portfolios stared at the back of his head. Would it always be so? Always a sh.e.l.l, always secrets? For his own secrets seemed likely to separate him from the rest of them as surely as any secret they had kept from him could have. And all he wanted was to be the Barbarossa he imagined: without illusions, without confusions, without shameful secrets: ferocious sometimes, embittered maybe, but all of a piece from breast to back.

He shivered. What had become of his jacket, anyway?

Not Yet His mother was drawing it over her shoulders as she climbed the hill, thinking: Who plays baseball in weather like this? Young maples along the path, surrendering early, had already flamed beside still-green sisters and brothers. Wasn't this football or soccer weather? An extrovert, she thought, and smiled and shook her head: the glad hand, the easy smile. Oh dear a Since her children had stopped growing up quite so fast, the seasons had started going by Daily Alice faster: once, her children were different people in spring and fall, so much learning and sensing and laughing and weeping were packed into their age-long summers. She had hardly noticed that this fall had come. Maybe because she had only one child now to be readied ftr school. One and Smoky. Practically dutiless on autumn mornings with only one lunch to make, one sleepy body to chivvy from bath to breakfast, one bookstrap and one pair of boots to find.

And yet, as she went up the Hill, she felt huge duties calling to her.

She reached the stone table at the peak of the Hill, a little out of breath, and sat on the stone bench by it. Beneath ita"a sorry mess, decayed and autumnal-lookinga"she glimpsed the pretty straw hat that Lucy had lost in June and mourned all summer. Seeing it, she felt sharply her children's fragility, their danger, their helplessness before loss, before pain, before ignorance. She named them in order in her mind: Tacey, Lily, Lucy, Auberon. They rang like bells of different pitch, some truer than others, but all answering her pull: they were fine, really, all four, just as she always told Mrs. Wolf or Marge Juniper or whoever else inquired after them: "They're fine." No: the duties she felt calling her (and she felt them more intensely now, seated in the sunlight above a wide landscape) didn't have to do with them, or with Smoky either. They had, Somehow, to do with that path upward, and this windy hill-top, and that sky raddled with fast-moving, pigeon-feather gray-and-white cloud, and this young autumn full (as every autumn so strangely is) of hope and expectation.

The feeling was intense, as though she were being drawn in or swept away; she sat motionless in its grip, marveling and a little frightened, expecting it to pa.s.s in a moment, like sensations of deja vu. But it didn't pa.s.s.

"What?" she said to the day. "What is it?"

Mute, the day couldn't answer: but it seemed to gesture to her, to tug at her familiarly, as though it had mistaken her for someone else. It seemed, and it would not stop seeming, just about to turn all at once to face in her direction, having heard her voicea"as though she had all this time been looking at the wrong or back side of it (and of everything, always) and was now about to see it plain, as it really was: and it she, too: and still it couldn't speak.

"Oh, what," Daily Alice said, not knowing she spoke. She felt that she was dissolving helplessly into what she beheld, and at the same time had grown imperious enough to command it in every part; light enough to fly; yet so heavy that not the stone bench but the whole stone hill was her seat; awed, yet for some reason not surprised as she came to know what was being asked of her, what she was summoned to.

"No," she said in reply; "no," she said, softly, as she might have to a child who had by mistake taken hold of her hand or the skirt of her dress, thinking her its mother, turning up to her, inquiringly, its wondering face. "No."

"Turn away," she said, and the day did.

"Not yet," she said, and rang the bells of her children's names again. Tacey Lily Lucy Auberon. Smoky. Too much, too much yet to do; and yet there would come a time when, no matter how much was left to do, no matter how her daily duties had grown or shrunk away, a time when she could no longer refuse. She wasn't unwilling, or afraid, though she thought that when the time came she would be afraid, and yet could not refuse. a Astonishing, astonishing that there could be no end to growing bigger, she had thought years ago that she had grown so huge that she could grow no more, and yet she hadn't even begun. But: "Not yet, not yet," she said, as the day turned away; "not yet, there's too much to do still; please, not yet."

The Black Crow (or someone like him), far off invisible through the turning trees, called its call, heading home.

Cras. Cras.

Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss.

a"Milton What Smoky liked about his girls' growing up was that, though they moved away from him, they did so (it seemed to him) less from any distaste or boredom than simply to accommodate a growth in their own lives: when they were kids, their lives and concernsa"Tacey's rabbits and music, Lily's bird's-nests and boy-friends, Lucy's bewildermentsa"could all fit within the compa.s.s of his life, which was then replete; and then as they grew up and out, they no longer fit, they needed room, their concerns multiplied, lovers and then children had to be fitted in, he could no longer contain them unless he expanded too, and so he did, and so his own life got larger as theirs did, and he felt them to be no further from him than ever, and he liked that. What he didn't like about their growing up was the same thing: that it forced him to grow, to enlarge, sometimes beyond what he felt the character he had come over the years to be encased in could stand.

Tossing and Turning There had been one great advantage in having grown up anonymous when he had come to have children: for they could make out of him what they wanted, could think him kindly or strict, evasive or frank, jolly or glum, as their own tempers required. That was great, great to be Universal Father, nothing withheld from him, he bet (though he had no way to prove it) that his daughters had told him more of their secrets, grave, shameful, or hilarious, than most men's did. But there were limits even to his flexibility, he couldn't as time went on stretch as much as he had once done, he found himself less and less able to ignore it when his character, growing ever more lobsterlike and unsheddable, disapproved of or could not understand the Young.

Perhaps it was chiefly that which had come between him and his youngest child, his son Auberon. Certainly the commonest emotions Smoky remembered feeling about the boy were a sort of baffled irritation, and a sadness over the mysterious gulf that seemed fixed between them. Whenever he got up the nerve to try to learn what was with his son, Auberon had produced a complex and wellpracticed secretiveness that Smoky was helpless and even bored before; when Auberon had come to him, on the other hand, Smoky had seemed unable not to retreat into a bluff, know-nothing, standard-issue parent costume, and Auberon would too quickly retire. And it had grown not better but worse as the years went by, until at last Smoky, with outward head-shaking and reluctance, and inward relief, had seen him off on his strange quest to the City.

Maybe if they'd played ball more. Just gone out, son and dad, and tossed the old pill around on a summer afternoon. Auberon had always liked to play ball, Smoky knew, though he himself had never been either good at it or happy doing it.

He laughed at the insufficiency of this reverie. Just the sort of thing his character might suggest, in the face of his children's inexplicability. Maybe, though, it had occurred to him because he sensed that some common touch, some ordinary gesture, might have crossed over what lay between him and his son; if there were something as wide that lay between him and his daughters, he had never noticed it, but of course it might well be there, disguised in the daily strangenesses of growing up today with a father who had grown up yesterday, or even the day before that.

None of his daughters had married, or seemed likely to, though he had now two grandchildren, Lily's twins, and Tacey seemed ready to bear a child by Tony Buck. Smoky held no particular brief for marriage, though he couldn't imagine life without his own, odd as it had proved to be; and as for fidelity, he had no right to speak at all. But he did find it distressing to think that his offspring would be more or less nameless, and that if this kept up might one day be describable only as race-horses are, by so-and-so out of soand-so. And he couldn't help thinking that there was something embarra.s.singly obvious in the couplings of his daughters with their lovers, a shamelessness that marriage would have decently hid. Or rather his character thought so. Smoky himself mostly cheered their daring, their bravery, and wasn't ashamed to admire their s.e.xuality as he had always admired their beauty. Big girls now, after all. But still a well, he hoped they could ignore it when his character made noises, or caused him, for instance, to decline to visit Tacey and what's-his-name when they were living together in a cave. A cave! His children seemed bent on recapitulating in their own lives the whole history of the race. Lucy gathered herbs for simples and Lucy read the stars and hung coral around her babies' necks to ward off evil; Auberon with a knapsack set out to seek his fortune. And in her cave Tacey discovered fire. Just when the supply of electricity in the world seemed to be running out for good, too. Thinking of which, he listened to the clock chime the quarter hour, and wondered if he should go down and shut down the generator.

He yawned. The single lamp lit in the library made a pool of light he was reluctant to leave. There was a pile of books by his chair from which he had been choosing for school; the old ones had grown repulsive to the hand and eye from years of use, and boring beyond expression. Another clock chimed, one o'clock, but Smoky didn't trust it. Outside in the corridor, a candle in her hand, a familiar wraith of nighttime pa.s.sed: Sophie, still awake.