Little, Big Part 1

LITTLE, BIG.

by John Crowley.

For Lynda.

who first knew it with the author's love.

LITTLE, BIG.

or, The Fairies' Parliament.

A little later, remembering man's earthly origin, *dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return,' they liked to fancy themselves bubbles of earth. When alone in the fields, with no one to see them, they would hop, skip and jump, touching the ground as lightly as possible and crying *We are bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth!'

a"Flora Thompson, Lark Rise.

Men are men, but Man is a woman.

Chesterton.

On a certain day in June, 19a", a young man was making his way on foot northward from the great City to a town or place called Edgewood, that he had been told of but had never visited. His name was Smoky Barnable, and he was going to Edgewood to get married; the fact that he walked and didn't ride was one of the conditions placed on his coming there at all.

Somewhere to Elsewhere Though he had left his City room early in the morning it was nearly noon before he had crossed the huge bridge on a little-used walkway and come out into the named but boundaryless towns on the north side or the river. Through the afternoon he negotiated those Indian-named places, usually unable to take the straight route commanded by the imperious and constant flow of traffic; he went neighborhood by neighborhood, looking down alleys and into stores. He saw few walkers, even indigenous, though there were kids on bikes; he wondered about their lives in these places, which to him seemed gloomily peripheral, though the kids were cheerful enough.

The regular blocks of commercial avenues and residential streets began gradually to become disordered, thinning like the extremes of a great forest; began to be broken by weedy lots as though by glades; now and then a dusty undergrown woods or a scruffy meadow announced that it was available to be turned into an industrial park. Smoky turned that phrase over in his mind, since that seemed truly the place in the world where he was, the industrial park, between the desert and the sown.

He stopped at a bench where people could catch buses from Somewhere to Elsewhere. He sat, shrugged his small pack from his back, took from it a sandwich he had made himselfa"another conditiona"and a confetti-colored gas-station road map. He wasn't sure if the map were forbidden by the conditions, but the directions he'd been given to get to Edgewood weren't explicit, and he opened it.

Now. This blue line was apparently the cracked macadam lined with untenanted brick factories he had been walking along. He turned the map so that this line ran parallel to his bench, as the road did (he wasn't much of a map reader) and found, far off to his left, the place he walked toward. The name Edgewood didn't appear, actually, but it was here somewhere, in this group of five towns marked with the legend's most insignificant bullets. So. There was a mighty double red line that went near there, proud with exits and entrances; he couldn't walk along that. A thick blue line (on the model of the vascular system, Smoky imagined all the traffic flowing south to the city on the blue lines, away on the red) ran somewhat nearer, extending corpuscular access to towns and townlets along the way. The much thinner sclerotic blue line he sat beside was tributary to this; probably commerce had moved there, Tool Town, Food City, Furniture World, Carpet Village. Well a But there was also, almost indistinguishable, a narrow black line he could take soon instead. He thought at first that it led nowhere, but no, it went on, faltering, seeming at first almost forgotten by the mapmaker in the ganglia, but then growing clearer in the northward emptiness, and coming very near a town Smoky knew to be near Edgewood.

That one, then. It seemed a walker's road.

After measuring with his thumb and finger the distance on the map he had come, and how far he had to go (much farther), he slung on his pack, tilted his hat against the sun, and went on.

A Long Drink of Water She was not much in his mind as he walked, though for sure she hadn't been far from it often in the last nearly two years he had loved her; the room he had met her in was one he looked into with the mind's eye often, sometimes with the trepidation he had felt then, but often nowadays with a grateful happiness; looked in to see George Mouse showing him from afar a gla.s.s, a pipe, and his two tall cousins: she, and her shy sister behind her.

It was in the Mouse townhouse, last tenanted house on the block, in the library on the third floor, the one whose mullioned windows were patched with cardboard and whose dark rug was worn white in pathways between door, bar and windows. It was that very room.

She was tall.

She was nearly six feet tall, which was several inches taller than Smoky; her sister, just turned fourteen, was as tall as he, Their party dresses were short, and glittered, hers red, her sister's white; their long, long stockings glistened. What was odd was that tall as they were they were shy, especially the younger, who smiled but wouldn't take Smoky's hand, only turned away further behind her sister.

Delicate giantesses. The older glanced toward George as he made debonair introductions. Her smile was tentative. Her hair was red-gold and curly-fine. Her name, George said, was Daily Alice.

He took her hand, looking up. "A long drink of water," he said, and she began to laugh. Her sister laughed too, and George Mouse bent down and slapped his knee. Smoky, not knowing why the old chestnut should be so funny, looked from one to another with a seraphic idiot's grin, his hand unrelinquished.

It was the happiest moment of his life.

Anonymity It had not been, until he met Daily Alice Drinkwater in the library of the Mouse townhouse, a life particularly charged with happiness; but it happened to be a life suited just right for the courts.h.i.+p he then set out on. He was the only child of his father's second marriage, and was born when his father was nearly sixty. When his mother realized that the solid Barnable fortune had largely evanesced under his father's management, and that there had been therefore little reason to marry him and less to bear him a child, she left him in an access of bitterness. That was too bad for Smoky, because of all his relations she was the least anonymous; in fact she was the only one of any related to him by blood whose face he could instantly bring to memory in his old age, though he had been a boy when she left. Smoky himself mostly inherited the Barnable anonymity, and only a streak of his mother's concreteness: an actual streak it seemed to those who knew him, a streak of presence surrounded by a dim glow of absence.

They were a large family. His father had five sons and daughter by his first wife; they all lived in anonymous suburbs of cities in those states whose names begin with an I and which Smoky's City friends couldn't distinguish from one another. Smoky confused the catalogue himself at times. Since his father was supposed by them to have a lot of money and it was never clear what he intended to do with it, Dad was always welcome in their houses, and after his wife's departure he chose to sell the house Smoky was born in and travel from one to another with his young son, a succession of anonymous dogs, and seven custom-made chests containing his library. Barnable was an educated man, though his learning was of such a remote and rigid kind that it gave him no conversation and didn't reduce his natural anonymity at all. His older sons and daughters regarded the chests of books as an inconvenience, like having his socks confused in the wash with theirs.

(Later on, it was Smoky's habit to try to sort out his half-siblings and their houses and a.s.sign them to their proper cities and states while he sat on the toilet. Maybe that was because it was in their toilets that he had felt most anonymous, anonymous to the point of invisibility; anyway, he would pa.s.s the time there shuffling his brothers and sisters and their children like a pack of cards, trying to match faces to porches to lawns, until late in life he could deal out the whole of it. It gave him the same bleak satisfaction he got from solving crossword puzzles, and the same doubta"what if he had guessed words that crossed correctly, but weren't the words the maker had in mind? The next-week's paper with the solution printed would never arrive.) His wife's desertion didn't make Barnable less cheerful, only more anonymous; it seemed to his older children, as he coalesced in and then evaporated from their lives, that he existed less and less. It was only to Smoky that he gave the gift of his private solidity: his learning. Because the two of them moved so often, Smoky never did go to a regular school; and by the time one of the states that began with an I found out what had been done to Smoky by his father all those years, he was too old to be compelled to go to school any more. So, at sixteen, Smoky knew Latin, cla.s.sical and medieval; Greek; some old-fas.h.i.+oned mathematics; and he could play the violin a little. He had smelled few books other than his father's leather-bound cla.s.sics; he could recite two hundred lines of Virgil more or less accurately; and he wrote in a perfect Chancery hand.

His father died in that year, shriveled it seemed by the imparting of all that was thick in him to his son. Smoky continued their wanderings for a few more years. He had a hard time getting work because he had no Diploma; at last he learned to type in a shabby business school, in South Bend he later thought it must have been, and became a Clerk. He lived a lot in three different suburbs with the same name in three different cities, and in each his relatives called him by a different namea"his own, his father's, and Smokya"which last so suited his evanescence that he kept it. When he was twenty-one, an unknown thrift of his father's threw down some belated money on him, and he took a bus to the City, forgetting as soon as he was past the last one all the cities his relatives had lived in, and all his relatives too, so that long afterwards he had to reconstruct them face by lawn; and once arrived in the City, he dispersed utterly and gratefully in it like a raindrop fallen into the sea.

Name Number He had a room in a building that had once been the rectory of the very old church that stood revered and vandalized behind it. From his window he could see the churchyard where men with Dutch names turned comfortably in their old beds. In the morning he got up by the clock of sudden traffica"which he could never learn to sleep through as he had the long thunder of Midwestern trainsa"and went to work.

He worked in a wide, white room where the little sounds he and the others made would rise to the ceiling and descend again strangely altered; when someone coughed, it was as though the ceiling itself coughed, apologetically, with covered mouth. All day long there Smoky slid a magnifying bar down column after column after column of tiny print, scrutinizing each name and its attendant address and phone number, and marking red symbols next to those that were not the same as the name and address and phone number typed on each card of stack after stack of cards that were piled daily next to him.

At first the names he read were meaningless to him, as deeply anonymous as their phone numbers. The only distinction a name had was its accidental yet ineluctable place in the alphabetical order, and then whatever idiot errors the computer could dress it in, which Smoky was paid to discover. (That the computer could make as few errors as it did impressed Smoky less than its bizarre witlessness; it couldn't distinguish, for instance, when the abbreviation "St." meant "street" and when it meant "saint," and directed to expand these abbreviations, would without a smile produce the Seventh Saint Bar and Grill and the Church of All Streets.) As the weeks fell away, though, and Smoky filled up his aimless evenings walking block after block of the City (not knowing that most people stayed inside after dark) and began to learn the neighborhoods and their boundaries and cla.s.ses and bars and stoops, the names that looked up at him through the gla.s.s bar began to grow faces, ages, att.i.tudes; the people he saw in buses and trains and candy stores, the people who shouted to each other across tenement shaftways and stood gaping at traffic accidents and argued with waiters and shopgirls, and the waiters and shopgirls too, began to mill through his flimsy pages; the Book began to seem like a great epic of the City's life, with all its comings and goings, tragedies and farces, changeful and full of drama. He found widowed ladies with ancient Dutch names who lived he knew in high-windowed buildings on great avenues, whose husbands, Estates of, they managed, and whose sons had names like Steele and Eric and were intr dcrtrs and lived in Bohemian neighborhoods; he read of a huge family with wild Greeksounding names who lived in several buildings on a noisome block he had walked once, a family that grew and discarded members every time he pa.s.sed them in the alphabeta"Gypsies, he decided at last; he knew of men whose wives and teenage daughters had private phones (on which they cooed with their lovers) while their men made calls on the many phones of the financial firms that bore their names; he grew suspicious of men who used their first initials and middle names because he found them all to be bill collectors, or lawyers whose bsns had the same address as their rsdnce, or city marshals who also sold used furniture; he learned that almost everyone named Singleton and everyone named Singletary lived in the northern black city where the men had for first names the names of past presidents and the women had gemlike names, pearl and ruby and opal and jewel, with a proud Mrs. before ita"he imagined them large and dark and glowing in small apartments, alone with many clean children. From the proud locksmith who used so many A's in his tiny shop's name that he came first to Archimedes Zzzyandottie who came last (an old scholar who lived alone, reading Greek newspapers in a shabby apartment) he knew them all. Beneath his sliding bar a tiny name and number would rise up like flotsam borne up a beach by waves and tell its story; Smoky listened, looked at his card, found them the same, and was turning down the card even as the distorting gla.s.s threw up the next tale. The reader next to him sighed tragically. The ceiling coughed. The ceiling laughed, loudly. Everyone looked up.

A young man who had just been hired had laughed.

"I've just found," he said, "a listing here for the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club." He could barely finish it for laughing, and Smoky was amazed that the silence of every other proofreader there didn't hush him. "Don't you get it?" The young man appealed to Smoky. "It sure would be a noisy bridge." Smoky suddenly laughed too, and their laughter rose to the ceiling and shook hands there.

His name was George Mouse; he wore wide suspenders to his wide pants, and when the day was done, he threw around himself a great woolen cloak whose collar trapped his long black hair, so that he must reach back and flip it out, like a girl. He had a hat like Svengali's, and eyes like him tooa"dark-shadowed, compelling, and humorous. It wasn't a week later that he was fired, to the relief of every pair of bifocals in the white room, but by then he and Smoky had become, as only Smoky in the whole world it seemed could any longer say with all seriousness, fast friends.

A City Mouse With George as his friend, Smoky began a course of mild debauchery, a little drink, a little drugs; George changed his clothes, and his patterns of speech, to a City tattersall, and introduced him to Girls. In not too long a while, Smoky's anonymity became clothed, like the Invisible Man in his bandages; people stopped b.u.mping into him on the street or sitting on his lap in buses without apologya"which he had attributed to his being very vaguely present to most people.

To the Mouse familya"who lived in the last tenanted building of a block of buildings the first City Mouse had built and which they still mostly owneda"he was at least present; and more than for his new hat and his new lingo he thanked George for that family of highly distinguishable and loudly loving folk. In the midst of their arguments, jokes, parties, walkings-out-in-bedroom-slippers, attempts at suicide and noisy reconciliations, he sat unnoticed for hours; hut then Uncle Ray or Franz or Mom would look up startled and say, "Smoky's here!" and he would smile.

"Do you have country cousins?" Smoky asked George once as they waited out a snowstorm over cafe-royale in George's favorite old hotel bar. And indeed he did.

At First Sight "They're very religious," George told him with a wink as he led him away from the giggly girls to introduce him to their parents, Dr. and Mrs. Drinkwater.

"Not a practicing doctor," said the Doctor, a wrinkled man with woolly hair and the unsmiling cheerfulness of a small animal. He was not as tall as his wife, whose generously-fringed and silken shawl trembled as she shook Smoky's hand and asked him to call her Sophie; she in turn wasn't as tall as her daughters. "All the Dales were tall," she said, looking up and inward as though she could see them all somewhere above her. She had given her surname therefore to her two great daughters, Alice Dale and Sophie Dale Drinkwater; but Mother was the only one who ever used the names, except that as a child Alice Dale had been called by some other child Daily Alice and the name had stuck, so now it was Daily Alice and plain Sophie, and there was nothing for it, except that anyone looking at them could certainly see that they were Dale; and they all turned to look at them.

Whatever religion it was that they practiced didn't prevent them from sharing a pipe with Franz Mouse, who sat at their feet since they two took up all of a small divan; or from taking the rum-punch Mom offered them; or from laughing behind their hands, more at what they whispered to each other than at anything silly Franz said; or showing, when they crossed their legs, long thighs beneath their spangled dresses.

Smoky went on looking. Even though George Mouse had taught him to be a City man and not afraid of women, a lifetime's habit wasn't so easily overcome, and he went on looking; and only after a decent interval of being paralyzed with uncertainty did he force himself to walk the rug to where they sat. Eager not to be a wet blanketa""Don't be a wet blanket, for G.o.d's sake," George was always telling hima"he sat down on the floor by them, a fixed smile on his face and a bearing that made him look (and he was, he was stunned to feel as Daily Alice turned to look at him, visible to her) oddly breakable. He had a habit of twiddling his gla.s.s between thumb and forefinger so that the ice trembled rapidly and chilled the drink. He did it now, and the ice rattled in the gla.s.s like a bell rung for attention. A silence fell.

"Do you come here often?" he said.

"No," she said evenly. "Not to the City. Only once in a while, when Daddy has business, or a other things."

"He's a doctor."

"Not really. Not any more. He's a writer." She was smiling, and Sophie beside her was giggling again, and Daily Alice went on with the conversation as though the object were to see how long she could keep a straight face. "He writes animal stories, for children."

"Oh."

"He writes one a day."

He looked up into her laughing eyes clear and brown as bottle gla.s.s. He had begun to feel very odd. "They must not be very long," he said, swallowing.

What was happening? He was in love, of course, at first sight, but he had been in love before and it had always been at first sight and he had never felt like thisa"as though something were growing, inexorably, within him.

"He writes under the name of Saunders," Daily Alice said.

He pretended to search his memory for this name, but in fact he was searching within for what it was that made him feel so funny. It had extended now outward to his hands; he examined them where they lay in his houndstooth lap, looking very weighty. He interlaced the ponderous fingers.

"Remarkable," he said, and the two girls laughed, and Smoky laughed too. The feeling made him want to laugh. It couldn't be the smoke; that always made him feel weightless and transparent. This was the opposite. The more he looked at her the stronger it grew, the more she looked at him the more he felt a what? In a moment of silence they simply looked at each other, and understanding hummed, thundered within Smoky as he realized what had happened: not only had he fallen in love with her, and at first sight, but she at first sight had fallen in love with him, and the two circ.u.mstances had this effect: his anonymity was being cured. Not disguised, as George Mouse had tried to do, but cured, from the inside out. That was the feeling. It was as though she stirred him with cornstarch. He had begun to thicken.

The Young Santa Claus He had gone down the narrow back stairs to the only john in the house that still worked, and stood looking into the wide, black-flecked mirror of that stone place.

Well. Who would have thought it. From the mirror a face looked out at him, not unfamiliar really, but still as though seen for the first time. A round and open face, a face that looked like the young Santa Claus as we might see him in early photographs: a little grave, dark-moustached, with a round nose and lines by the eyes already where little laughing birds had walked though he wasn't yet twenty-three. All in all, a face of sunny disposition, with something in the eyes still blank and unresolved, pale and missing, that would, he supposed, never fill in. It was enough. In fact it was miraculous. He nodded, smiling, at his new acquaintance, and glanced at him again over his shoulder as he left.

As he was going up the back stairs, he met Daily Alice coming down, suddenly, at a turning. Now there was no idiot grin on his face; now she wasn't giggling. They slowed as they approached each other; when she had squeezed past him she didn't go on but turned to look back at him; Smoky was a step higher than she, so that their heads were in the relation dictated by movie kisses. His heart pounding with fear and elation, and his head humming with the fierce certainty of a sure thing, he kissed her. She responded as though for her too a certainty had proved out, and in the midst of her hair and lips and long arms encircling him, Smoky added a treasure of great price to the small store of his wisdom.

There was a noise then on the stair above them and they started. It was Sophie, and she stood above them eyes wide, biting her lip. "I have to pee-pee," she said, and danced by them lightly.

"You'll be leaving soon," Smoky said.

"Tonight."

"When will you come back?"

"I don't know."

He held her again; the second embrace was calm and sure. "I was frightened," she said. "I know," he said, exulting. G.o.d she was big. How was he to handle her when there was no stair to stand on?

A Sea Island As a man well might who had grown up anonymous, Smoky had always thought that women choose or do not choose men by criteria he knew nothing of, by caprice, like monarchs, by taste, like critics; he had always a.s.sumed that a woman's choice of him or of another was foregone, ineluctable and instant. So he waited on them, like a courtier, waited to he noticed. Turns out, he thought, standing late that night on the Mouse stoop, turns out not so; theya"she anywaya"is flushed with the same heats and doubts, is like me shy and overcome by desire, and her heart raced like mine when the embrace was at hand, I know it did.

He stood for a long time on the stoop, turning over this jewel of knowledge, and sniffing the wind which had turned, as it infrequently does in the City, and blew in from the ocean. He could smell tide, and sh.o.r.e and sea detritus, sour and salt and bittersweet. And realized that the great City was after all a sea island, and a small one at that.

A sea island. And you could forget so basic a fact for years at a time if you lived here. But there it was, amazing but true. He stepped off the stoop and down the street, solid as a statue from breast to back, his footsteps ringing on the pavement.

Correspondence Her address was "Edgewood, that's all," George Mouse said, and they had no phone; and so because he had no choice, Smoky sat down to make love through the mails with a thoroughness just about vanished from the world. His thick letters were consigned to this Edgewood place, and he waited for reply until he couldn't wait anymore and wrote another, and so their letters crossed in the mail as all true lovers' letters do; and she saved them and tied them with a lavender ribbon, and years later her grandchildren found them and read of those old people's improbable pa.s.sion.