Little, Big Part 18

Keeping People Out On the floor below there were light and laughter; people greeted him as they went in and out of apartments with the makings of a communal dinner; children chased along the halls. But the first floor was dark again, unused now except for storage. George, holding his lantern aloft, peered down along the dark hall to the outer door, and could see its great bar in place, its chains and locks secure. He went around the stairs to the door which led to the bas.e.m.e.nt, taking Out as he went an enormous bunch of keys. One, specially marked, dark as an old penny, unlocked the ancient Segal lock of the bas.e.m.e.nt.

Every time he opened the bas.e.m.e.nt door, George fretted over whether he shouldn't put a nice new padlock on it; this old lock was a toy by now, an elder's grip, anyone could break it. He always decided that a new lock would only make people wonder, and a shoulder against the door would satisfy curiosity, new padlock or no.

Oh, they had all grown very circ.u.mspect in this matter of keeping people out.

Down, the stairs, even more carefully, G.o.d knew what lived down here amid the rusted pipe and old boilers and fabulous detritus, he had once stepped on something large, soft and dead and nearly broken his neck. At the bottom of the stairs he hung up his lantern, went to a corner, and maneuvered an old trunk so that he could stand on it and reach a high, ratproof shelf.

He had had the gift, predicted long ago by Great-aunt Cloud (left him by a stranger, and not money), for a long time before he learned how he could have come by it. Even before he learned, he was in his Mouse way secretive about it, the result of growing up on the street and youngest in a nosy family. Everyone admired the potent, musky has.h.i.+sh George seemed always to be provided with, and all desired to have some; but he would not (could not) introduce them to his dealer (who was long dead). He kept everyone happy with free bits, and the pipe was always full at his place; but though sometimes, after a few pipes of it, he would look around at his stupefied company and feel guilt for his gloating, and his great, his hilarious, his astonis.h.i.+ng secret would burn within him to be spilt, he never told, not a soul.

It was Smoky who, inadvertently, revealed to George the source of his great good fortune. "I read somewhere," Smoky said (his usual entry into conversation), "that oh fifty or sixty years ago, your neighborhood was a Middle Eastern neighborhood. Lots of Lebanese. And the little candy stores and places like that sold has.h.i.+sh, right out in the open. You know, along with the toffee and halvah. For a nickel, you could buy a lot. Big hunks. Like chocolate bars."

And indeed they were very much like chocolate barsa . George had felt like a cartoon mouse suddenly struck over the head with the great, well-worn mallet of Revelation.

Ever afterward, when he went down to take from his h.o.a.rd, he had imagined himself a goat-bearded Levantine, hooknosed and skull-capped, a secret pederast who gave free baklava to the olive boys of the streets. Fussily he would arrange the old trunk and climb on it (lifting the frayed skirts of an imaginary dressing gown) and lift the lid of the wooden crate stenciled with curling letters.

Not much left. Time to reorder soon.

Beneath a thick covering of silvered paper, layer upon layer of lay. The layers were separated by yellow oiled paper. The bars themselves were wrapped tightly too in a third sort of oily paper. He took out two, considered a moment, and put one reluctantly back. It would not, though he had exclaimed so in awe many years ago when he had discovered what it was, last forever. He replaced the layer of oiled paper and then the layer of silvered paper; he drew back on the stout lid, and pushed in place the ancient shapeless nails; he blew across it to resettle the dust. He got down, and studied the bar in the lantern's light as he had the very first by electric light. He peeled away its paper carefully. It was as black as chocolate, and about the size of a playing card, an eighth of an inch thin. It bore on it a convolute impress: A trademark? Tax stamp? Mystic sign? He had never decided.

He pushed the trunk he had used for a stepladder back into its place in the corner, took up the lantern and started up the stairs. In his cardigan pocket was a piece of has.h.i.+sh something like a hundred years old, and, George Mouse had long ago decided, not reduced in potency by age at all. Improved, perhaps, like vintage port.

News from Home He was relocking the cellar door when there came a pounding at the street door, so sudden and unexpected that he cried out. He waited a moment, hoping it was some madman's momentary whim and wouldn't come again. But it did. He went to the door, listened at it without speaking, and heard frustrated cursing outside. Then, with a growl, the someone grabbed at the bars and began to shake them.

"That's no use, that's no use," George called. The shaking stopped.

"Well, open the door."

"What?" It was a habit of George's, when stuck for an answer, to act as though he hadn't heard the question.

"Open the door!"

"Now, you know I can't just open the door, man. You know what it's like."

"Well, listen. Can you tell me which of these buildings is number two-twenty-two?"

"Who wants to know?"

"Why does everybody in this city answer everything with a question?"

"Huh?"

"Why can't you open the door and talk to me like a G.o.d d.a.m.n human being?"

Silence. The horrid depths of frustration in that outcry touched George's heart, and he listened at the door to see if there would be more; he tingled secretly at the safety he felt behind the door's fastness.

"Can you tell me," the someone began, and George could hear his rage strangled down into politeness, "please, where I can find, or if you know, the Mouse house or George Mouse?"

"Yes," George said. "I am him." That was risky, but surely even the most desperate bill-collectors and process-servers weren't abroad this late. "Who are you?"

"My name is Auberon Barnable. My father a" But already the clankings and sc.r.a.pings of locks and shootings of bolts drowned him out. George reached into the darkness and pulled the person standing on the threshold into the hall. With quick skill he reslammed and barred and bolted the door, and then raised his lamp to look at his cousin.

"So you're the baby," he said, noting with perverse pleasure how ill this remark sat on the tall youth. The moving lantern made his expression changeful, but it wasn't really a changeful face; it was narrow and tight; in fact the whole of him, slim and neat as a pen in pipe-rack black clothes that fit him well, was somewhat rigid and aloof. Just p.i.s.sed off, George thought. He laughed, and patted his arm. "Hey, how's the folks? How's Elsie, Lacy, and Tilly, whatever their names are? What brings you here?"

"Dad wrote," Auberon said, as though unwilling to waste effort answering all this if it had already been done.

"Oh yeah? Well, you know how the mail's been. Look, look. Come on. We don't have to stand in the hall. Colder than a witch's t.i.t here. Coffee and something?"

Smoky's son shrugged shortly. "Be careful on the stairs," George said, and the lamplight threaded them both back through the tenement and over the little bridge till they stood together on the threadbare rug where Auberon's parents had first met.

Somewhere along their route, George had picked up an old three-and-a-half-legged kitchen chair. "Did you run away from home? Have a seat," he said, motioning Auberon to a tattered wingback.

"My father and mother know I left, if that's what you mean," Auberon said, a bit haughtily, which was understandable, George thought. Then he shrank back in the chair: George had with a grunt and a wild look raised the broken chair over his head, and, his face twisted with exertion, brought it down on the stone hearth. It fell clattering to pieces. "Did they approve?" George asked, tossing the chair-parts into the fire.

"Of course." Auberon crossed his legs and plucked at his trouser-knee. "He wrote. I told you. He said to look you up."

"Oh, yeah. Did you walk?"

"No." With some contempt.

"And you came to the City to a"

"To seek my fortune."

"Aha." George hung a kettle over the fire and took down a precious can of contraband coffee from a bookshelf. "Any glimpse yet what form it might take?"

"No, not exactly. Onlya" George mmm-hmmm'd encouragingly as he prepared the coffeepot and set out mismatched cups. "I wanted, I want to write, or be a writer." George raised his eyebrows. Auberon was twisted around in the wing-back chair as though these admissions were escaping him against his will, and he were trying to hold them in. "I thought television."

"Wrong coast."

"What?"

"They do all that television out on the Sunny, the Golden, the West Coast." Auberon locked his right foot behind his left calf and declined to answer this. George, searching for something in the bookshelves and drawers and beating his many pockets, wondered how that antique desire could have made its way to Edgewood. Odd how the young take to these dying trades so hopefully. When he was young, when the last poets were prattling incommunicado, glowworms gone out in their dells of dew, boys of twenty-one set out to be poetsa . At length he found what he was looking for: a gift-shop dagger-shaped letter-opener chased with enamel which he had found years ago in an abandoned apartment and sharpened to a fine edge. "Takes a lot of ambition, that television," he said, "and drive, and the failures are many." He poured water into the coffeepot.

"How would you know?" his cousin said swiftly, as though he had heard that adult wisdom often before.

"Because," George said, "I haven't got those qualities, and I haven't failed in that field cause I don't, to wit, QED. Coffee's running through." The boy didn't crack a smile. George put the coffeepot on a trivet that bore a joke in Pennsylvania Dutch argot, and broke out a tin box of cookies, mostly broken. He also took from his cardigan pocket the brown square of has.h.i.+sh. "Like a taste?" he said, not at all grudgingly, he thought, showing Auberon the square. "Best Lebanese. I think."

"I don't use drugs."

"Oh, aha."

Judging nicely, George cut off a corner with his Florentine instrument, pierced the fragment with its point, and dunked it in his cup. He sat turning the knife in the cup and looking at his cousin, who was blowing on his coffee with single-minded intensity. Ah, it was lovely to be old and gray, and to have learned to ask neither for too much nor too little. "So," he said. He lifted the knife from his coffee to see that the fragment had nearly dissolved. "Tell us your history."

Auberon was mum.

"Come on, let's have it." He slurped the fragrant brew eagerly. "News from home."

It took a deal of questioning, but as the night wore down, Auberon did speak phrases, yield anecdotes. It was enough for George; his laced coffee finished, he heard a whole life in Auberon's sentences, complete with amusing detail and odd conjunctions; pathos, even magic, even. He found himself looking into his cousin's closed heart as into the halved sh.e.l.l of a coiled and chambered nautilus.

What George Mouse Heard He'd left Edgewood early, awakening just before dawn, as he'd intended toa"it was an ability he shared with his mother, that he could wake when he chose. He lit a lamp; it would be another hour or two before Smoky shuffled down to the bas.e.m.e.nt to start up the generator. There was a trembling tightness around his diaphragm, as though something struggled for release or escape there. He knew the phrase "b.u.t.terflies in your stomach," but is one of those people to whom phrases like that communicate nothing. He has had b.u.t.terflies in his stomach as he'd had the w.i.l.l.i.e.s, and the jitters; more than once he has been beside himself; but has always thought these experiences were his alone, and never knew they were so common as to have names. His ignorance allowed him to compose poetry about the weird feelings he felt, a handful of typewritten pages which as soon as he was dressed in the neat black suit he put carefully into the green canvas knapsack along with his other clothes, his toothbrush, what else? An antique Gillette, four bars of soap, a copy of Brother North-wind's Secret, and the testamentary stuff for the lawyers.

He walked through the sleeping house for what he solemnly imagined was the last time, on his way to an unknown destiny. The house seemed in fact to be quite restless, tossing and turning in an unquiet half-dream, opening its eyes, startled, as he pa.s.sed. A watery, wintery light lay along the corridors; the imaginary rooms and halls were real in the gloom.

"You look as though you hadn't shaved," Smoky said uncertainly when Auberon came into the kitchen. "You want some oatmeal?"

"I didn't want to wake up everybody, running the water and everything. I don't think I can eat."

Smoky went on fussing with the old wood stove anyway. It always amazed Auberon as a child to see his father go to bed at night in this house and then appear at his desk in the schoolhouse next morning as though translated, or as though there were two of him. The first time he got up early enough to catch his father with frowzy hair and a plaid robe, on his way between sleep and school, it was as though he had caught out a conjurer; but in fact Smoky always made his own breakfast, and though for years the glossy white electric range has stood cold and useless in the corner, like a proud old housekeeper unwillingly retired, and Smoky was as unhandy with fires as he was about most things, he went on doing it; it only meant he had to get up earlier to begin.

Auberon, growing impatient with his father's patience, bent down before the stove and got it angrily flaming in a moment; Smoky stood behind him, hands in his robe pockets, admiring; and in a while they sat opposite each other with bowls of oatmeal, and coffee too, a gift from George Mouse in the City.

They sat for a moment, hands in laps, looking not into each other's eyes but into the brown Brazilian eyes of the two coffee cups together; and then Smoky, with an apologetic cough, got up and got the brandy bottle from a high shelf. "It's a long walk," he said, and spiked the coffee.

Smoky?

Yes; George could see that there could well have grown in him in the last years a sort of constriction of feeling sometimes that a nip can untangle. No problem really; just a nip, so he can begin to ask Auberon if he's sure he has enough money, if he's got Grandpa's agents' address and George Mouse's address and all the legal instruments and so on about the inheritance and so on. And yes he does.

Even after Doc died, his stories continued to be published in the City's evening papera"George read them even before he read the funnies. Besides these posthumous stories squirreled away like winter nuts, Doc left a mess of affairs as thick and entangling as any briar patch; lawyers and agents pursued his intentions there, and might for years. Auberon had a special interest in these th.o.r.n.y matters because Doc had specified a bequest to him, enough to live for a year or so and write unhampered. Doc had hoped, actuallya"though he was too shy to say soa"that his grandson and the best friend of his last years might take up the little adventures, though Auberon was at a disadvantage therea"he would have to make them up, unlike Doc, who for years had been getting them firsthand.

There's a certain embarra.s.sment, George could easily imagine, in learning that you can talk to animals. No one knew how long Doc's conviction was in growing, though some of the grown-ups could remember his first claiming it was so, shyly, tentatively, as a joke they supposed, a lame sort of joke, but then Doc's jokes weren't ever very funny except to millions of children. It took later the form of a metaphor or puzzle: he recounted his conversations with salamanders and chickadees with a cryptic smile, as though inviting his family to guess why he spoke so. In the end, he ceased trying to hide it: what he heard from his correspondents was just too interesting not to recount.

Since all this was happening as Auberon was coming into consciousness, it only seemed to him that his grandfather's powers were growing surer, his ear more keen. When, on one of their long walks together through the woods, Doc at last stopped pretending that what he heard the animals say was made up, and admitted that he was pa.s.sing on conversations he heard, they both felt a lot better. Auberon never much liked let's-pretend, and Doc had hated lying to the child. The science of it escaped him, he said; maybe it was only a result of his long devotion; anyway, it was only certain animals he could understand, small ones, the ones he knew best. Bears, moose, the scarce and fabulous cats, the solitary, long-winged predators he knew nothing of. They disdained him, or couldn't discourse, or had no use for small talka"he couldn't tell.

"And insects and bugs?" Auberon asked him.

"Some, but not all," Doc answered.

"Ants?"

"Oh, yes, ants," Doc said, "sure."

And taking his grandson's hands where they knelt together beside a new yellow hill, he gratefully translated for him the mindless shoptalk of the ants within.

George Mouse Goes on Overhearing Auberon was asleep now, on the bursting loveseat, curled beneath a blanket, as who would not be who had risen as early and come as far in as many ways as he had today; but George Mouse, subject to tics and exulting on the giddy chutes and ladders of High Thought, kept watch over the boy and continued to overhear his adventures.

When, oatmeal untasted but coffee finished, he went out the great front door, Smoky's hand paternally on his shoulder though it was higher than his own, Auberon saw that he wasn't to make his getaway without goodbyes. His sisters, all three, had come to see him off; Lily and Lucy were walking up the drive arm-in-arm, Lily bearing her twins fore-and-aft in canvas carriers, and Tacey was just turning in at the end of the drive on her bike.

He might have known, but hadn't wished this sendoff, wished it less than anything because of the formal finality his sisters' presence always lent to whatever partings or arrivals or conjunctions they attended. How the h.e.l.l anyway had they known this was to be the morning? He had only told Smoky late last night, and sworn him to secrecy. A certain familiar rage rose in him whose name he didn't know was rage. "Hi, hi," he said.

"We came to say goodbye," Lily said. Lucy s.h.i.+fted the front twin and added, "And give you some things."

"Yeah? Well." Tacey turned her bike neatly at the porch stairs and dismounted. "Hi, hi," Auberon said again. "Did you bring along the whole county?" But of course they hadn't brought anyone else; no one else's presence was necessary, as theirs was.

Perhaps because their names were so similar, or because so often in the community they appeared and acted together, but people around Edgewood always found it hard to distinguish among Tacey, Lily, and Lucy. In fact they were very different. Tacey and Lily were descendants of their mother and her mother, long, bigboned and coltish, though Lily had inherited from somewhere a head of fine straight blond hair, straw spun into gold as the princess in the story spun it, where Tacey's was curly reddish-gold like Alice's. Lucy, though, was all Smoky's; shorter than her sisters, with Smoky's dark curls and Smoky's cheerful bemused face and even something of Smoky's congenital anonymity in her round eyes. But in another sense it was Lucy and Lily who were a pair: the sort of sisters who can finish one another's sentences, and feel even at a distance one another's pains. For years the two of them kept up a running series of seemingly pointless jokes; one would ask, in a serious tone, a silly question, and the other would just as seriously give an even sillier answer, and then they would (never cracking a smile) give the joke a number. The numbers ran into the hundreds. Tacey, perhaps because she was the oldest, was remote from their games; she was a naturally regal and private person who cultivated intensely a number of pa.s.sions, for the alto recorder, for raising rabbits, for fast bikes. On the other hand, in all complots, plans, and ceremonies that dealt with grownups and their affairs, it had always been Tacey who was priestess, and the younger two her acolytes.

(In one thing all three were alike: they each had only one eyebrow, running over their noses from outer eye-corner to outer eye-corner without a break. Of Smoky and Alice's children, only Auberon was without it.) Auberon's memories of his sisters would always be of their playing at the mysteries, birth, marriage, love, and death. He had been their Baby when he was very young, chivvied around from imaginary bath to imaginary hospital endlessly, a living doll. Later he was compelled to be Bridegroom, and finally Departed when he was old enough to be pleased simply to lie there while they ministered to him. And it was not only play; as they grew older, all three seemed to develop an instinctive grasp of the scenes and acts of quotidian life, of the curtains rising and rung down in the lives around them. No one remembered telling them (they were aged four, six, and eight then) that the youngest of the Bird girls was to be married to Jim Jay over in Plainfield, but they appeared at the church in jeans with bunches of wildflowers in their hands and knelt decorously on the church steps while inside the bride and groom took their vows. (The wedding photographer, waiting outside for the couple to appear, took a whimsical picture of the three darlings which later won a prize in a photo contest. It looked posed. In a sense, it was.) From an early age, they had all three learned needlework, becoming more skilled and taking up in turn more difficult and esoteric branches of it as they got older, tatting, silk embroidery, crewel-work; what Tacey learned first from Great-aunt Cloud and her grandmother she taught to Lily, and Lily to Lucy; and as they sat together expertly doing and undoing with thread (often in the many-sided music room where the sun came in at all seasons) they kept up among themselves a constant calendar of the pa.s.sings, pledges, partings, parturitions expected (announced or not) among the people they knew. They made knots, they snipped threads, they knew all; it came to pa.s.s that no sad or glad occasion was unknown to them, and few went forward without the three of them present. Those that did seemed incomplete, unsanctioned. Their only brother's departure for his appointment with destiny and lawyers was not to be one of those.

"Here," said Tacey, plucking from her bike's basket a small package done up in ice-blue paper, "take this, and open it when you get to the City." She kissed him lightly.

"Take this," Lily said, giving him one wrapped in mintygreen, "and open it when you think of it."

"Take this," Lucy said. Hers was wrapped in white. "Open it when you want to come home again."

He gathered these together, nodding, embarra.s.sed, and put them in his duffle. The girls said nothing more about them, only sat for a while with him and Smoky on the porch, across which dead leaves blew unswept, gathering up under the seats of wicker chairs (whith ought to go in the bas.e.m.e.nt, Smoky thought; an old ch.o.r.e of Auberon's; he felt a chill of foreboding, or loss, but thought it to be the somber November gloaming only). Auberon, who was young and solitary enough to think that he might have escaped his house without anyone being the wiser, that no one paid much attention to his movements, sat constrainedly with them watching dawn grow; then he slapped his knees, rose, shook his father's hand, kissed his sisters, promised to write, and at last stepped off southward into the sounding sea of leaves, striking for the crossroads where a bus could be hailed; he didn't look back at the four who watched him go.

"Well," Smoky said, remembering his own journey to the City at an age near Auberon's, "he'll have adventures."

"Lots," Tacey said.

"It'll be fun," Smoky said, "probably, possibly. I remember a"

"Fun for a while," Lily said.

"Not much fun," Lucy said. "Fun first, though, at least."

"Dad," said Tacey, seeing him trembling, "you shouldn't sit out here in your *jammies, for G.o.d's sake."

He rose, pulling his bathrobe around him. This afternoon he would have to get in the porch furniture, before snow piled absurdly in its summery seats.