Little, Big Part 33

They looked at each othera"all standing nowa"in that unconvincing manner, this time expressing thoughtful doubt or doubtful thought, and took a muted leave of her. One hoped aloud as they went out that she had not been offended; and the others, as they inserted themselves into their cars, pondered that possibility, and what it might mean for them.

Hawksquill, alone, pondered it too.

Released from her obligation to the Club, she was a free agent. If a new old Empire were rearising in the world, she couldn't but think it would give her new and wider scope for her powers. Hawksquill was not immune to the lure of power; great wizards rarely are.

And yet no New Age was at hand. Whatever powers stood behind Russell Eigenblick might not, in the end, be as strong as the powers the Club could bring against them.

Whose side then, supposing she could determine which side was which, would she be on?

She watched the legs her brandy made on the sides of the gla.s.s. A week from today a She rang for the Maid of Stone, ordered coffee, and readied herself for a long night's work: they were too few now to spend one asleep.

A Secret Sorrow Exhausted by fruitless labor, she came down some time after dawn and went out into the bird-loud street.

Opposite her tall and narrow house was a small park which had once been public but which was now sternly locked; only the residents of those houses and private clubs which faced on it, viewing it with calm possessiveness, had keys to the wrought-iron gates. Hawksquill had one. The park, too chock-full of statues, fountains, birdbaths and such fancies, rarely refreshed her, since she had more than once used it as a sort of notepad, sketching quickly on its sunwise perimeter a Chinese dynasty or a Hermetic mathesis, none of which (of course) she was now able to forget.

But now in the misty dawn on the first day of May it was obscure, vague, not rigorous. It was air mostly, almost not a City air, sweet and rich with the exhalation of newborn leaves; and obscurity and vagueness were just what she required now.

As she came up to the gate she used, she saw that someone was standing before it, gripping the bars and staring within hopelessly, obverse of a jailed man. She hesitated. Walkers-abroad at this hour were of two kinds: humdrum hard workers up early, and the unpredictable and the lost who had been up all night. Those seemed to be pajama bottoms protruding from beneath this one's long overcoat, but Hawksquill didn't take this to mean that he was an early riser. She chose a grand-lady manner as best suited to the encounter and, taking out her key, asked the man to excuse her, she'd like to open the gate.

"About time too," he said.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," she said; he had stood aside only slightly, expectantly, and she saw that he intended to follow her in. "It's a private park. I'm afraid you can't come in. It's only for those who live around it, you see. Who have the key."

She could see his face now clearly, with its desperate growth of whisker and its wrinkles etched deeply with filth; yet he was young. Above his fierce yet vacant eyes a single eyebrow ran.

"It's d.a.m.ned unfair," he said. "They've all got houses, what the h.e.l.l do they need a park for too?" He stared at her, rageful and frustrated. She wondered if she should explain to him that there was no more injustice in his being locked out of this park than out of the buildings that surrounded it. The way he looked at her seemed to require some plea; or then on the other hand perhaps the injustice he complained of was the universal and unanswerable kind, the kind Fred Savage liked to point up, needing no spurious or ad-hoc explanations. "Well," she said, as she often did to Fred.

"When your own great-grandfather built the d.a.m.n thing." His eyes looked upward, calculating. "Great-great-grandfather." He pulled, with sudden purpose, a glove from his pocket, put it on (his medicus extending naked from an unseamed finger) and began brus.h.i.+ng away the new-leaving ivy and obscuring dirt from a plaque screwed to the rusticated red-stone gate-post. "See? d.a.m.n it." The plaque saida"it took her a moment to work it out, surprised she had never noticed it, the whole history of Beaux-Arts public works could have been laid on its close-packed Roman face and the floweret nailheads that held it in placea"the plaque said "Mouse Drinkwater Stone 1900."

He wasn't a nut. City-dwellers in general and Hawksquill in particular have a sure sense, in these encounters, of the distinctiona"fine but reala"between the impossible imaginings of the mad and the equally impossible but quite true stories of the merely lost and d.a.m.ned, "Which," she said, "are you, the Mouse, the Drinkwater, or the Stone?"

"I guess you wouldn't know," he said, "how impossible it is to get a little peace and quiet in this town. Do I look like a b.u.m to you?"

"Well," she said.

"The fact is you can't sit down on a G.o.d d.a.m.n park bench or a doorway without ten drunks and loudmouths collecting as though they were blown together. Telling you their life stories. Pa.s.sing around a bottle. Chums. Did you know how many b.u.ms are queer? A lot. It's surprising." He said it was surprising but in fact he seemed to feel it was just what was to be expected and no less infuriating for that. "Peace and quiet," he said again, in a tone so genuinely full of longing, so full of the dewy tulip-beds and shadowed walks within the little park, that she said: "Well, I suppose an exception can be made. For a descendant of the builder." She turned her key in the lock and swung open the gate. For a moment he stood as before those final gates of pearl, wondering; then he went in.

Once inside his rage seemed to abate, and though she hadn't intended it, she walked with him along the curiously curving paths that seemed always about to lead them deeper within the park but in fact always contrived to direct them back to its perimeters. She knew the secret of thesea"which was, of course, to take those paths which seemed to be heading outward, and you would go in; and with subtle motions she directed their steps that way. The paths, though they didn't seem to, led them in to where a sort of pavilion or templea"a tool shed in fact, she supposeda"stood at the park's center. Overarching trees and aged bushes disguised its miniature size; from certain angles it appeared to be the visible porch or corner of a great house; and though the park was small, here at the center the surrounding city, by some trick of planting and perspective, could hardly be perceived at all. She began to remark on this.

"Yes," he said. "The further in you go, the bigger it gets. Would you like a drink?" He pulled from his pocket a flat clear bottle.

"Early for me," she said. She watched, fascinated, as he undid the bottle and slid a good bit of it down a throat no doubt now so flayed and tanned it couldn't feel. She was surprised then to see him shaken by big involuntary shudders, and his face twisted in disgust just as hers would have been if she'd tried that gulp. Just a beginner, she thought. Just a child, really. She supposed he had a secret sorrow, and was pleased to contemplate it; it was just the change she needed from the hugeness she had been struggling with.

They sat together on a bench. The young man wiped the neck of his bottle on his sleeve and recapped it carefully. He slid it into the pocket of his brown overcoat without haste. Strange, she thought, that gla.s.s and clear cruel liquid could be so comforting, so tenderly regarded. "What the h.e.l.l is that supposed to be?" he said.

They faced the square stone place that Hawksquill supposed to he a tool shed or other facility, disguised as a pavilion or miniature pleasure-dome. "I don't know exactly," she said, "but the reliefs on it represent the Four Seasons, I think. One to a side."

The one before them was Spring, a Greek maiden doing some potting, with an ancient tool very like a trowel and a tender shoot in her other hand. A baby lamb nestled near her and like her looked hopeful, expectant, new. It was all quite well done; by varying the depth of his cutting, the artist had given an impression of distant fields newly turned and returning birds. Daily life in the ancient world. It resembled no spring that had ever come to the City, but it was nonetheless Spring. Hawksquill had more than once employed it as such. She had for a time wondered why the little house had been placed off-center on its plot of ground, not square with the streets around the park; and after a little thought saw that it faced the compa.s.s points, Winter facing north and Summer to the south, Spring east, and Autumn west. It was easy to forget, in the City, that north was only very approximately uptowna"though not easy for Hawksquill, and apparently this designer had thought a true orientation important too. She liked him for it. She even smiled at the young man next to her, a supposed descendant, though he looked like a City creature who didn't know solstice from equinox.

"What good is it?" he said, quietly but truculently.

"It's handy," said Hawksquill. "For remembering things."

"What?"

"Well," she said. "Suppose you wanted to remember a certain year, and the order in which events happened then. You could memorize these four panels, and use the things pictured in them as symbols for the events you want to remember. If you wanted to remember that a certain person was buried in the spring, well, there's the trowel."

"Trowel?"

"Well, that digging tool."

He looked at her askance. "Isn't that a little morbid?"

"It was an example."

He regarded the maiden suspiciously, as if she were in fact about to remind him of something, something unpleasant. "The little plant," he said at length, "could be something you began in the spring. A job. Some hope."

"That's the idea," she said.

"Then it withers."

"Or bears fruit."

He was thoughtful a long time; he drew out his bottle and repeated his ritual exactly, though with less grimace. "Why is it," he said then, his voice faint from the gin that had washed it, "that people want to remember everything? Life is here and now. The past is dead."

She said nothing to this.

"Memories, Systems. Everybody poring over old alb.u.ms and decks of cards. If they're not remembering, they're predicting. What good is it?"

An old cowbell rang within Hawksquill's halls. "Cards?" she said.

"Brooding on the past," he said, regarding Spring. "Will that bring it back?"

"Only order it." She knew that, reasonable as they might seem, people like this who live on the street are differently composed from people who live in houses. They have a reason for being where they are, expressed in a peculiar apprehension of things, a loss of engagement with the ordinary world and how it goes on, often unwilled, She knew she must not press questions on him, pursue a subject, for like the paths in this place that would only lead her away. Yet she wanted very much now not to lose contact. "Memory can be an art," she said schoolmarmishly. "Like architecture. I think your ancestor would have understood that."

He lifted eyebrows and shoulders as though to say Who knows, or cares.

"Architecture, in fact," she said, "is frozen memory. A great man said that."

"Hm."

"Many great thinkers of the past"a"how she had caught this teachery tone she didn't know, but she couldn't seem to relinquish it, and it seemed to hold her hearera""believed that the mind is a house, where memories are stored; and that the easiest way to remember things is to imagine an architecture, and then cast symbols of what you wish to remember on the various places defined by the architect." Well, that surely must have lost him, she thought, but after some thought he said: "Like the guy buried with the trowel."

"Exactly."

"Dumb," he said.

"I can give you a better example."

"Hm."

She gave him Quintillian's highly-colored example of a law-case, freely subst.i.tuting modern for ancient symbols, and spreading them around the parts of the little park. His head swiveled from side to side as she placed this and that here and there, though she had no need to look. "In the third place," she said, "we put a broken toy car, to remind us of the driver's license that expired. In the fourth placea"that arch sort of thing behind you to the lefta"we hang a man, say a Negro all dressed in white, with pointed shoes hanging down, and a sign on him: INRI."

"What on earth."

"Vivid. Concrete. The judge has said: unless you have doc.u.mentary proof, you will lose the case. The Negro in white means having it on paper."

"In black and white."

"Yes. The fact that he's hanged means we have captured this black-and-white proof, and the sign, that it is this that will save us."

"Good G.o.d."

"It sounds terribly complicated, I know. And I suppose it's really not any better than a notebook."

"Then why all that guff? I don't get it."

"Because," she said carefully, sensing that despite his outward truculence he understood her, "it can happena"if you practice this arta"that the symbols you put next to one another will modify themselves without your choosing it, and that when next you call them forth, they may say something new and revelatory to you, something you didn't know you knew. Out of the proper arrangement of what you do know, what you don't know may arise spontaneously. That's the advantage of a system. Memory is fluid and vague. Systems are precise and articulated. Reason apprehends them better. No doubt that's the case with those cards you spoke of."

"Cards?"

Too soon? "You spoke of brooding over a deck of cards."

"My aunt. Not my aunt really," as though disclaiming her. "My grandfather's aunt. She had these cards. Lay them out, think about them. Brood on the past. Predict things."

"Tarot?"

"Hm?"

"Were they the Tarot deck? You know, the hanged man, the female pope, the tower a"

"I don't know.. How would I know? n.o.body ever explained anything to me." He brooded. "I don't remember those pictures, though."

"Where did they come from?"

"I dunno. England, I guess. Since they were Violet's."

She started, but he was lost in thought and didn't see. "And there were some cards with pictures? Besides the court cards?"

"Oh yeah. A whole slew of *em. People, places, things, notions."

She leaned back, interlacing her fingers slowly. It had happened before that a place which she had put to multiple memory uses, like this park, came to be haunted by figments, hortatory or merely weird, called into being simply by the overlap of old juxtapositions, speaking, sometimes, of a meaning she would not otherwise have seen. If it were not for the sour smell of this one's overcoat, the undeniable this-worldness of the striped pajamas beneath it, she might have thought him to be one of them. It didn't matter. There is no chance. "Tell me," she said. "These cards."

"What if you wanted to forget a certain year?" he said. "Not remember it, but forget it. No help there, is there? No system for that, oh no."

"Oh, I suppose there are methods," she said, thinking of his bottle.

He seemed sunk in bitter reflection, eyes vacant, long neck bent like a sad bird's, hands folded in his lap. She was casting about for words to form a new question about the cards when he said: "The last time she read those cards for me, she said I'd meet a dark and beautiful girl, of all cornball things."

"Did you?"

"She said I'd win this girl's love through no virtue I had, and lose her through no fault of my own."

He said nothing else for a time, and (though not sure now that he heard or registered much of anything she said to him) she ventured softly: "That's often the way, with love." Then, when he didn't respond: "I have a certain question that a certain deck of cards might answer. Does your aunt still a"

"She's dead."

"Oh."

"My aunt, though. I mean she wasn't my aunt, but my aunt. Sophie." He made a gesture which seemed to mean This is complex and boring, but surely you catch my drift.

"The cards are still in your family," she guessed.

"Oh, yeah. Never throw out anything."

"Where exactly a"

He raised a hand to stop her question, suddenly wary. "I don't want to go into family matters."

She waited a moment and then said: "It was you who mentioned your great-great-grandfather, who built this park." Why suddenly was she visted with a vision of Sleeping Beauty's castle? A chateau. With a hedge of thorn, impa.s.sable.

"John Drinkwater," he said, nodding.

Drinkwater. The architect a A mental snap of fingers. That hedge wasn't thorn. "Was he married to a woman named Violet Bramble?"

He nodded.

"A mystic, a seer of sorts?"

"Who the h.e.l.l knows what she was."

Urgency suddenly compelled her to a gesture, rash perhaps, but there was no time to waste. She took from her pocket the key to the park and held it up before him by its chain, as old mesmerists used to do before their subjects. "It seems to me," she said, seeing him take notice, "that you deserve free access here. This is my key." He held out a hand, and she drew the key somewhat away. "What I require in exchange is an introduction to the woman who is or is not your aunt, and explicit directions as to how to find her. All right?"

As though in fact mesmerized, staring fixedly at the glinting bit of bra.s.s, he told her what she wanted to know. She placed the key in his filthy glove. "A deal," she said.

Auberon clutched the key, his only possession now, though Hawksquill couldn't know that, and, the spell broken, looked away, not sure he hadn't betrayed something, but unwilling to feel guilt.

Hawksquill rose. "It's been most illuminating," she said. "Enjoy the park. As I said, it can be handy."