Little, Big Part 2

"I couldn't tell you," she said. "Jeff? Can you tell this young man the way to Edgewood?" She awaited an answer from within he couldn't hear, and then opened the door. "Come in," she said. "We'll see."

The house was tiny and tidy and stuffed with stuff. An old, old dog of the dust-mop kind sniffed at his feet, laughing breathlessly; be b.u.mped into a bamboo telephone table, shouldered a knickknack shelf, stepped on a sliding scatter rug and fell through a narrow archway into a parlor that smelled of roses, bay rum and last winter's fires. Jeff put down his newspaper and lifted his slippered feet from their ha.s.sock. "Edgewood?" he asked around his pipe.

"Edgewood. I was given directions, sort of."

"You hitching?" Jeff's lean mouth opened like a fish's to puff as he perused Smoky doubtfully.

"No, walking actually." Above the fireplace was a sampler. It said: I will Live in a House By the side of the Road Be a Friend to Man.

Margaret Juniper 1 9 2 7 "I'm going there to get married." Ahhh, they seemed to say.

"Well." Jeff stood. "Marge, get the map."

It was a county map or something, much more detailed than Smoky's; he found the constellation of towns he knew of, neatly outlined, but nothing for Edgewood. "It should be somewhere around these." Jeff found the stub of a pencil, and with a "hmmm" and a "let's see," connected the centers of the five towns with a five-pointed star. The pentagon enclosed by the lines of the star he tapped with the pencil, and raised his sandy eyebrows at Smoky. An old map-reader's trick, Smoky surmised. He discerned the shadow of a road crossing the pentagon, joining the road he walked, which stopped for good here at Meadowbrook. "Hmmm," he said.

"That's about all I can tell you," Jeff said, re-rolling the map.

"You going to walk all night?" Marge asked.

"Well, I've got a bedroll."

Marge pursed her lips at the comfortless blankets strapped to the top of his pack. "And I suppose you haven't eaten all day."

"Oh, I've got, you know, sandwiches, and an apple a"

The kitchen was papered with baskets of impossibly luscious fruit, blue grapes and russet apples and cleft peaches that protruded like bottoms from the harvest. Marge moved dish after steaming dish from stove to oilcloth, and when it was all consumed, Jeff poured out banana liqueur into tiny ruby gla.s.ses. That did it; all his polite remonstrance with their hospitality vanished, and Marge "did up the davenport" and Smoky was put to bed wrapped in an earthbrown Indian blanket.

For a moment after the Junipers had left him, he lay awake looking around the room. It was lit only by a night-light that plugged right into the outlet, a night-light in the shape of a tiny, rosecovered cottage. By its light he saw Jeff's maple chair, the kind whose orange paddle arms had always looked tasty to him, like glossy hard candy. He saw the ruffled curtains move in the rose-odorous breeze. He listened to the dust-mop dog sigh in his dreams. He found another sampler. This one said, he thought but could not be sure: The Things that Make us Happy Make us Wise.

He slept.

You may observe that I do not put a hyphen between the two words.

I write "country house," not "country-house." This is deliberate.

a"V. Sackville-West Daily Alice awoke, as she always did, when the sun broke in at her eastward windows with a noise like music. She kicked off the figured coverlet and lay naked in the long bars of sun for a time, touching herself awake, finding eyes, knees, b.r.e.a.s.t.s, red-gold hair all in place and where she had left them. Then she stood, stretched, brushed the last of sleep from her face, and knelt by the bed amid the squares of sun and said, as she had every morning since she could speak, her prayers: O great wide beautiful wonderful World With the wonderful waters around you curled And the beautiful gra.s.s upon your breast O World you are beautifully dressed.

A Gothic Bathroom Devotions done, she tilted the tall standing mirror that had been her great-grandmother's so that she could see her whole length in it, asked the usual question of it and got the right reply this morning; sometimes it was equivocal. She belted around herself a long brown gown, did a turn on her toes so that its frayed edges flew out, and went out wary into the still cold hall. She pa.s.sed her father's study and listened briefly to his old Remington click-clacking about the adventures of mice and rabbits. She opened the door to her sister Sophie's room; Sophie was tangled in her bedclothes, a long golden hair in her parted lips, and her sleeping hands closed like a baby's. The morning sun was just then looking in at this room, and Sophie stirred, resentful. Most people look odd asleep; foreign, not themselves. Sophie asleep looked most like Sophie, and Sophie liked sleep and could sleep anywhere, even standing up. Daily Alice stayed awhile to watch her, wondering what her adventures were. Well, she would hear later, in detail.

At the end of a whorl of hall was the Gothic bathroom, the only one in the house with a tub long enough for her. Stuck as it was at a turning of the house, the sun hadn't yet reached it; its stained windows were dim and its cold tile floor made her stand tiptoe. The gargoyle faucet coughed phthisically, and deep within the house the plumbing held conference before allowing her some hot water. The sudden rush had its effect, and she gathered up her brown skirts around her waist and sat on the somewhat episcopal hollow throne, chin in hand, watching the steam rise from the sepulchral tub and feeling suddenly sleepy again.

She pulled the chain, and when the loud clash of contrary waters was done she unbelted and stepped from her gown, shuddered, and climbed carefully into the tub. The Gothic bathroom had filled with steam. Its sort of Gothic was really more woodland than church; the vaulting of it arched above Daily Alice's head and interlaced like meeting branches, and everywhere carven ivy, leaves, tendrils and vines were in restless biomorphic motion. On the surface of the narrow stained-gla.s.s windows, dew formed in drops on cartoon-bright trees, and on the distant hunters and vague fields which the trees framed; and when the sun on its lazy way had lit up all twelve of these, bejewelling the fog that rose from her bath, Daily Alice lay in a pool in a medieval forest. Her great-grandfather had designed the room, but another had made the gla.s.s. His middle name was Comfort, and that's what Daily Alice felt. She even sang.

From Side to Side While she scrubbed and sang, her bridegroom came on, footsore and surprised at the fierceness of his muscles' retaliation for yesterday's walk. While she breakfasted in the long and angular kitchen and made plans with her busy mother, Smoky climbed up a buzzing, sun-shot mountain and down into a valley. When Daily Alice and Sophie were calling to each other through intersecting halls and the Doctor was looking out his window for inspiration, Smoky stood at a crossroads where four elder elms stood like grave old men conversing. A signboard there said EDGEWOOD and pointed its finger along a dirt road that looped down a shadowy tunnel of trees; and as he walked it, looking from side to side and wondering what next, Daily Alice and Sophie were in Daily Alice's room preparing what Daily Alice next day would wear, while Sophie told her dream.

Sophie's Dream "I dreamt that I had learned a way of saving time I didn't want to spend, and having it to spend when I needed it. Like the time you spend waiting in a doctor's office, or coming back from someplace you didn't enjoy going to, or waiting for a busa"all the little useless s.p.a.ces. Well, it was a matter of taking them and folding them up, like broken boxes, so that they took up less room. It was really an easy trick, once you knew you could do it. n.o.body seemed surprised at all when I told them I'd learned how; Mother just nodded and smiled, you know, as though of course everybody learns at a certain age how to do these things. Just break it along the seams; be careful not to lose any; fold it flat. Daddy gave me this enormous envelope of sort of marbled paper to put it all in, and when he gave it to me I remembered seeing envelopes like that around, and wondering what they were for. Funny how you can make up memories in dreams to explain the story." While she talked, Sophie's quick fingers were dealing with a hem, and Daily Alice couldn't always hear her because she talked with pins in her mouth. The dream was hard to follow anyway; Daily Alice forgot each incident as soon as Sophie told it, just as though she were dreaming them herself. She picked up and put down a pair of satin shoes, and wandered out onto the tiny balcony of her oriel window. "I got frightened then," Sophie was saying. "I had this big dreary envelope stuffed with unhappy time, and I didn't know how to get any out and use it when I wanted it without letting all the dreary waiting and stuff out. It seemed maybe I'd made a mistake starting this. Anyhow a" Daily Alice looked down the front way, a brown drive with a tender spine of weed, all trembling in leaf shadow. Down at the end of the drive, gateposts grew up with a sudden curve from a wall, each topped with a pitted ball like a gray stone orange. As she looked, a Traveler turned hesitantly in at the gate.

Her heart turned over. She had been so happily calm all day that she had decided he wasn't coming, that Somehow her heart knew he wouldn't come today and that therefore there was no reason for it to sink and hammer in expectation. And now her heart was taken by surprise.

"Then it all got mixed up. It seemed there wasn't any time that wasn't being broken flat and put away, that I wasn't doing it any more, that it was happening by itself; and that all that was left was awful time, walking down halls time, waking up in the night time, nothing doing timea ."

Daily Alice let her heart hammer, there being nothing she could say to it anyway. Below, Smoky came closer, slowly, as though in awe, she could not tell of what; but when she knew that he saw her, she undid the brown robe's belt and shrugged the robe from her shoulders. It slid open down her arms to her wrists and she could feel, like cool hands and warm, the shadows of leaves and the sun on her skin.

Led Astray There was a hot flush in his legs that began with the soles of his feet and traveled midway up his s.h.i.+ns, as though the long friction of his journey had heated them. His bitten head hummed with the noonday, and there was a sharp, threadlike pain in the inside of his right thigh. But he stood in Edgewood; there was no doubt. Even as he came down the path toward the immense and manyangled house, he knew he wouldn't ask the old woman on the porch for directions, because he needed none; he had arrived. And when he came close to the house, Daily Alice showed herself to him. He stood staring, his sweat-stained pack dangling in his hand. He didn't dare responda"there was the old woman on the porcha"but he couldn't look away.

"Lovely, isn't it?" the old woman said at last. He blushed. She sat upright smiling at him from her peac.o.c.k chair; there was a little gla.s.s-topped table by her, and she was playing solitaire. "I saya"lovely," she repedted, a little louder.

"Yes!"

"Yes a so graceful. I'm glad it's the first thing you see, coming up the drive. The cas.e.m.e.nts are new, but the balcony and all the stonework are original. Won't you come up on the porch? It's difficult to talk this way."

He glanced up again, but Alice was gone now; there was only a fanciful housetop painted with sunlight. He ascended to the pillared porch. "I'm Smoky Barnable."

"Yes. I'm Nora Cloud. Won't you sit?" She picked up her cards with a practiced hand and put them into a velvet bag; the velvet bag she then put into a tooled box.

"Was it you then," he said sitting in a whispering wicker chair, "who put these conditions on me about the suit and the walking and all?"

"Oh, no," she said. "I only discovered them."

"A sort of test."

"Perhaps. I don't know." She seemed surprised by the suggestion. She took from her breast pocket, where a neat and useless handkerchief was pinned, a brown cigarette, and lit it with a kitchen match she struck on her sole. She wore a light dress of the sort of print proper to old ladies, though Smoky thought he had never seen one quite so intensely blue-green, or one with leaves, tiny flowers, vines, so intricately intertwined: as though cut from the whole day. "I think prophylactic, though, on the whole."

"Hm?"

"For your own safety."

"Ah, I see." They sat in silence awhile, Great-aunt Cloud's a calm and smiling silence, his expectant; he wondered why he wasn't taken within, introduced; he was conscious of the heat rising from his s.h.i.+rt's open neck; he realized it was Sunday. He cleared his throat. "Dr. and Mrs. Drinkwater at church?"

"Why, in a sense, yes." It was odd the way she responded to everything he said as though it were a notion that had never occurred to her before. "Are you religious?"

He had been afraid of this. "Well," he began.

"The women tend to be more so, don't you think?"

"I guess. No one I grew up with cared much about it."

"My mother and I felt it far more strongly than my father, or my brothers. Though they suffered from it, perhaps, more than we."

He had no answer for this, and couldn't tell if her close inspection of him just then awaited one, or didn't, or was merely short sight.

"My nephew alsoa"Dr. Drinkwatera"well of course there are the animals, which he does pay close attention to. He pays very close attention there. The rest seems to pa.s.s him by."

"A pantheist, sort of?"

"Oh no. He's not that foolish. It just seems to"a"she moved her cigarette in the aira""pa.s.s him by. Ah, who's here?"

A woman in a large picture hat had turned in at the gate on a bicycle. She wore a blouse, printed like Cloud's but more patent, and a pair of large jeans. She dismounted inexpertly and took a wooden bucket from the bike's basket; when she tilted her picture hat back, Smoky recognized Mrs. Drinkwater. She came up and sat heavily on the steps. "Cloud," she said, "that is forever the last time I will ever ask you for advice about berrying again."

"Mr. Barnable and I," said Cloud merrily, "were discussing religion."

"Cloud," said Mrs. Drinkwater darkly, scratching her ankle above a slip-on sneaker frayed about the big toe, "Cloud, I was led astray."

"Your bucket is full."

"I was led astray. The bucket, h.e.l.l, I filled that the first ten minutes I got there."

"Well. There you are."

"You didn't say I would be led astray."

"I didn't ask."

There was a pause then. Cloud smoked. Mrs. Drinkwater dreamily scratched her ankle. Smoky (who didn't mind not being greeted by Mrs. Drinkwater; in fact hadn't noticed it; that comes from growing up anonymous) had time to wonder why Cloud hadn't said you didn't ask. "As for religion," Mrs. Drinkwater said, "ask Auberon."

"Ah. There you see. Not a religious man." To Smoky: "My older brother."

"It's all he thinks about," Mrs. Drinkwater said.

"Yes," Cloud said thoughtfully, "yes. Well, there it is, you see."

"Are you religious?" Mrs. Drinkwater asked Smoky.

"He's not," Cloud said. "Of course there was August."

"I didn't have a religious childhood," Smoky said. He grinned. "I guess I was sort of a polytheist."

"What?" said Mrs. Drinkwater.

"The Pantheon. I had a cla.s.sical education."

"You have to start somewhere," she replied, picking leaves and small bugs from her bucket of berries. "This should be nearly the last of the foul things. Tomorrow's Midsummer Day, thank it all."

"My brother August," Cloud said, "Alice's grandfather, he was perhaps religious. He left. For parts unknown."

"A missionary?" Smoky asked.

"Why yes," Cloud said, again seeming newly struck with the idea. "Yes, maybe so."

"They must be dressed by now," Mrs. Drinkwater said. "Suppose we go in."

An Imaginary Bedroom The screen door was old and large, its wood pierced and turned a bit to summery effect, and the screen potbellied below from years of children's thoughtless egress; when Smoky pulled its porcelain handle, the rusty spring groaned. He stepped across the sill. He was inside.

The vestibule, tall and polished, smelled of cool trapped night air and last winter's fires, lavender sachets in bra.s.s-handled linen closets, what else? Wax, sunlight, collated seasons, the June day outside brought in as the screen groaned and clacked shut behind him. The stairs rose before him and above him, turning a half-circle by stages to the floor above. On the first landing, in the light of a Iancet window there, dressed now in jeans made all of patches, her feet bare, his bride stood. A little behind her was Sophie, a year older now but still not her sister's height, in a thin white dress and many rings.

"Hi," said Daily Alice.

"Hi," Smoky said.

"Take Smoky upstairs," Mrs. Drinkwater said. "He's in the imaginary bedroom. And I'm sure he wants to wash up." She patted his shoulder and he put his foot on the first stair. In later years he would wonder, sometimes idly, sometimes in anguish, whether having once entered here he had ever again truly left; but at the time he just mounted to where she stood, deliriously happy that after a long and extremely odd journey he had at last arrived and that she was greeting him with brown eyes full of promise (and perhaps then this was the journey's only purpose, his present happiness, and if so a good one and all right with him) and taking his pack and his hand and leading him into the cool upper regions of the house.

"I could use a wash," he said, a little breathless. She dipped her big head near his ear and said, "I'll lick you clean, like a cat." Sophie giggled behind them.

"Hall," Alice said, running her hand along the dark wainscoting. She patted the gla.s.s doork.n.o.bs she pa.s.sed: "Mom and Dad's room. Dad's studya"shhh. My rooma"see?" He peeked in, and mostly saw himself in the tall mirror. "Imaginary study. Old orrery, up those stairs. Turn left, then turn left." The hallway seemed concentric, and Smoky wondered how all these rooms managed to sprout off it. "Here," she said.

The room was of indiscernible shape; the ceiling sank toward one corner sharply, which made one end of the room lower than the other; the windows there were smaller too; the room seemed larger than it was, or was smaller than it looked, he couldn't decide which. Alice threw his pack on the bed, narrow and spread for summer in dotted swiss. "The bathroom's down the hall," she said. "Sophie, go run some water."

"Is there a shower?" he asked, imagining the hard plunge of cool water.

"Nope," Sophie said. "We were going to modernize the plumbing, but we can't find it anymorea ."

"Sophie."