Little, Big Part 44

"What was the middle?"

"You were in it! What was it? It was you!"

He drew her familiar hand around him closer. "What about the end?" he said.

"Well that's what I mean," she said. "The end."

Quick, before a looming something he saw darkly huge in her words could steal over him, he said, "No no no no. Things don't have ends like that, Alice. Any more than they have beginnings. Things are all middles in life. Like Auheron's show. Like history. One d.a.m.n thing after another, that's all."

"Tales have ends."

"Well, so you say, so you say, but a"

"And the house," she said.

"What about the house?"

"Couldn't it have an end? It seems like it will, not long from now; if it did a"

"No. It'll just get older."

"Fall apart a"

He thought of its cracked walls, its vacant rooms, the seep of water in its bas.e.m.e.nts; its paintless clapboards growing warped, masonry rotting; termites. "Well, it's not its fault," he said.

"No, sure."

"It's supposed to have electricity. Lots of it. That's how it was made. Pumps. Hot water in the pipes, hot water in the heaters. Lights. Ventilators. Things freeze and crack, because there's no heat, because there's no electricity."

"I know."

"But that's not its fault. Not our fault either. Things have gotten so bad. Russell Eigenblick. How can you get things fixed when there's a war on? His domestic policy. Crazy. And so things run out, and there's no electricity, and so a"

"And whose fault," she said, "do you think Russell Eigenblick is?"

For a moment, just for a moment, Smoky allowed himself to feel the Tale closing around him, and around all of them; around everything that was. "Oh, come on," he said, a charm to banish the idea, but it persisted. A Tale: a monstrous joke was more like it: the Tyrant installed, after G.o.d knows how many years' preparation, amid bloodshed and division and vast suffering, just so that one old house could be deprived of what it needed to live on, so that the end of some convoluted history, which coincided with the house's end, could be brought about, or maybe only hastened; and he inheriting that house, maybe lured there in the first place by love only so that eventually he could inherit it, and inheriting it only so that (though he struggled against it, tools were never far from his hapless hands, all to no good) he could preside overa"maybe even, through some clumsiness or inadequacy he could easily imagine himself capable of, insurea"its dissolution; and that dissolution in turn bringing about a "Well, what then?" he asked. "If we couldn't live here any more."

She didn't answer, but her hand sought his and held it.

Diaspora. He could read it in her hand's touch.

No! Maybe the rest of them could imagine such a thing (though how, when it had always been more their house than his?), maybe Alice could, or Sophie, or the girls; imagine some impossible imaginary destination, some place so far a But he could not. He remembered a cold night long ago, and a promise: the night they had first been in the same bed, he and Alice, bedclothes drawn up, lying together like a double S, when he saw that in order to go where she would go, and not be left behind, he would have to find within himself a child's will to believe that had never been much exercised in him and was even then long in disuse; and he found himself no more ready to follow now than he had ever been. "Would you leave?" he asked.

"I think," she said.

"When."

"When I know where it is I'm supposed to go." She drew even closer to him, as though in apology. "Whenever that is." Silence. He felt her breath tickle his neck. "Not soon, maybe." She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder. "And maybe not leave; I mean leave-leave; maybe not ever."

But that was just to placate him, he knew. He had after all never been more than a minor character in that destiny, he had always expected to be left in some sense behind: but that fate had been for so long in abeyance, causing him no grief, that (without ever quite forgetting it) he had chosen to ignore it; had even sometimes allowed himself to believe that he had made it, by his goodness and acquiescence and fidelity, go away. But he had not. Here it was: and, as gently as she could consonant with there being no mistake about it, Alice was telling him so.

"Okay, okay," he said. "Okay." That was a code-word between them, meaning I don't understand but I have come to the limit of my strength to try to understand, and I trust you to this point anyway, and let's talk of something else. Buta".

"Okay," he said again, and this time meant a different thing by it: because he saw just then that there was one way, an impossible unfollowable way but the only way there was, for him to fight thisa"yes! Fight!a"and that Somehow he would have to find it.

It was his d.a.m.n house now, d.a.m.n it, and he would have to keep it alive, that's all. For if it lived, if it could, then the Tale couldn't end, could it? No one would have to leave, maybe no one could leave (what did he know about it?) if the house held together, if there was some way to halt its decline, or reverse it. So he would have to do that. Strength alone wouldn't be enough, not anyway his strength; cunning would be needed. Some huge thought would have to be thought (did he feel it, down deep, trying to be born, or was that just blind hope?) and nerve would be necessary, and application, and tenacity like grim death's. But it was the way; the only way.

Access of energy and resolve spun him in the bed, the ta.s.sel of his nightcap flying. "Okay, Alice, okay," he said again. He kissed her fiercelya"his too!a"and then again firmly; and she laughed, embracing him, not knowing (he thought) that he had just resolved to spend his substance subverting her; and she kissed him back.

How could it be, Daily Alice wondered as they kissed, that to say such things as she had said to the husband she loved, on this darkest night of the year, made her not sad but glad, filled in fact with happy expectation? The end: to have the Tale end meant to her to have it all forever, no part left out, complete and seamless at lasta"certainly Smoky couldn't be left out, not as deeply woven into its stuff as he had become. It would be good, so good to have it all at last, start to finish, like some long, long piece of work that has been executed in dribs and dabs, in the hope and faith that the last nail, the last st.i.tch, the last tug at the strings, will make it all suddenly make sense: what a relief! It didn't, quite, not yet; but now in this winter Alice could at last believe, with no reservations, that it would: they were that close. "Or maybe," she said to Smoky, who paused in his attentions to her, "maybe just beginning." Smoky groaned, shaking his head, and she laughed and clasped him to her.

When there was no more talk from the bed, the girl who had for some time been watching the bedclothes heave and listening to their words turned to go. She had come in through the door (left open for the cats to go in and out) silently, on bare feet, and then stood in the shadows watching and listening, a small smile on her lips. Because a mountain-range of quilts and coverlets rose between their heads and the room, Smoky and Alice hadn't seen her there, and the incurious cats, who had opened big eyes when she had entered, had returned to fitful sleep, only now and then regarding her through narrowed lids. She paused a moment now at the door, for the bed had begun to make noises again, but she couldn't make anything of these, mere low sounds, not words, and she slipped through the door and into the hall.

There was no light there but a faint snowlight coming in through the cas.e.m.e.nt at the haIl's end, and slowly, like someone blind, she went with small silent steps, arms extended, past closed doors. She considered each dark blank door as she pa.s.sed it, but shook her blond head at each in turn, thinking; until, rounding a corner, she came to an arched one, and smiled, and with her small hand turned its gla.s.s k.n.o.b and pushed it open.

To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.

a"Johnson on Cymbeline Sophie too had gone to bed early and not to sleep.

In her old figured bed-jacket, and a cardigan over that, she lay huddled close to the candle which stood on the bedside table, two of her fingers only allowed out from the bedclothes to hold open the pages of the second volume of an ancient three-volume novel. When the candle began to gutter, she reached into the table's drawer, took out another, lit it from the first, pressed it down into the candlestick, sighed, and turned the page. She was far, far from the final weddings; only now had the will been secreted in the old cabinet; the bishop's daughter thought of the ball. The door of Sophie's room opened, and a child came in.

What a Surprise She wore only a blue dress, without sleeves or a belt. She came a step through the door, her hand still on its k.n.o.b, smiling the smile of a child who has a terrific secret, a secret which she's not sure will amuse or annoy the grown-up she stands before; and for a time she only stood in the doorway, glowing faintly in the candlelight, her chin lowered and her eyes raised to Sophie turned to stone on the bed.

Then she said: "h.e.l.lo, Sophie."

She looked just as Sophie had imagined she would, at the age she would have been when Sophie had been unable to imagine her further. The candle-flame s.h.i.+vered in the draft from the open door, which cast strange shadows over the child, and Sophie grew for a moment as afraid and struck with strangeness as she had ever in her life been, but this was no ghost. Sophie could tell that by the way the child, having come in, turned to push the heavy door closed behind her. No ghost would have done that.

She came slowly toward the bed, hands clasped behind her, with her secret in her smile. She said to Sophie: "Can you guess my name?"

That she spoke was for some reason harder for Sophie to take in than that she stood there, and Sophie for the first time knew what it was not to believe her ears: they told her that the child had spoken, but Sophie didn't believe it, and couldn't imagine answering. It would have been like speaking to some part of herself, some part that had suddenly and inexplicably become detached from her and then turned to face her, and question her.

The child laughed a small laugh; she was enjoying this. "You don't," she said. "Do you want me to give you a hint?"

A hint! Not a ghost, and not a dream, for Sophie was awake; not her daughter, certainly, for her daughter had been taken from her over twenty-five years ago, and this was a child: yet for sure Sophie knew her name. She had raised her hands to her face, and between them now she said or whispered: "Lilac."

Lilac looked a little disappointed. "Yes," she said. "How did you know?"

Sophie laughed, or sobbed, or both at once. "Lilac," she said.

Lilac laughed, and made to climb up on the bed with her mother, and Sophie perforce had to help her up: she took Lilac's arm, wondering, afraid that perhaps she would herself feel her own touch, and if she did, thena"then what? But Lilac was flesh, cool flesh, it was a child's wrist her fingers circled; she drew up Lilac's real solid weight with her strength, and Lilac's knee pressed the bed and made it jounce, and every sense Sophie had was certain now that Lilac was here before her.

"Well," Lilac said, brus.h.i.+ng the golden hair from before her eyes with a quick gesture. "Aren't you surprised?" She watched Sophie's stricken face. "Don't you say h.e.l.lo or kiss me or anything?"

"Lilac," Sophie only said again; for there had been for many, many years one thought forbidden to Sophie, one unimaginable scene, this one, and she was unrehea.r.s.ed; the moment and the child were just as she would have imagined them to be if she had allowed herself to imagine them at all, but she had not, and now she was unready and undone.

"You say," Lilac said, indicating Sophiea"it hadn't been easy memorizing all this, and it should come out righta""you say, *h.e.l.lo, Lilac, what a surprise,' because you haven't seen me since I was a baby; and then I say, *I came a long way, to tell you this and this,' and you listen, but first before that part you say how much you missed me since I was stolen, and we hug." She flung open her arms, her face pretending to radiant, poignant joy to cue Sophie; and there was nothing then for Sophie to do but to open her arms too, no matter how slowly and tentatively (not fearful now but only deeply shy before the impossibility of it) and take Lilac in them.

"You say, *What a surprise,'" Lilac reminded her, whispering close to her ear.

Lilac's odor was of snow and self and earth. "What a surprise," Sophie began to say, but couldn't finish it, because tears of grief and wonderment flew up her throat behind the words, bringing with them all that Sophie had been denied and had denied herself all these years. She wept, and Lilac, surprised herself now, thought to draw away, but Sophie held her; and so Lilac patted her back gently to comfort her.

"Yes," she said to her mother, "yes, I came back; I came a long way, a long long way."

Walking From There She may have come a long, long way; for sure she remembered that this was what she was to say. She remembered no long journey, though; either she had awakened only after most of it had been sleepwalked away, or in fact it had really been quite shorta .

"Sleepwalked?" Sophie asked.

"I've been asleep," Lilac said. "For so long. I didn't know I'd sleep so long. Longer than the bears even. Oh, I've been asleep ever since a day, since the day I woke you up. Do you remember?"

"No," Sophie said.

"On a day," Lilac said, "I stole your sleep. I shouted *Wake up!' and pulled your hair."

"Stole my sleep?"

"Because I needed it. I'm sorry," she said gleefully.

"That day," Sophie said, thinking How odd to be so old and full of things, and have your life inverted as a child's can bea . That day. And had she slept since then?

"Since then," Lilac said. "Then I came here."

"Here. From where?"

"From there. From sleep. Anyway a"

She awoke, anyway, out of the longest dream in the world, forgetting all of it or nearly all of it as she did so, to find herself stepping along a dark road at evening, silent fields of snow on either side and a still cold pink-and-blue sky all around, and a task she'd been prepared for before she slept, and which her long sleep had not forgotten, ahead of her to do. All that was clear enough, and Lilac didn't wonder at it; often enough in her growing up she'd found herself suddenly in strange circ.u.mstances, emerging from one enchantment into another like a child carried sleeping from a bed to a celebration and waking, blinking, staring, but accepting it all because familiar hands hold him. So her feet fell one after the other, and she watched a crow, and climbed a hill, and saw the last spark of a red sun go out, and the pink of the sky deepen and the snow turn blue; and only then, as she descended, did she wonder where she was, and how much further she had to go.

There was a cottage at the bottom of the hill, amid dense small evergreens, from whose windows yellow lamplight shone out into the blue evening. When Lilac reached it she pushed open the little white gate in its picket fencea"a bell tinkled within the house as she did soa"and started up the path. The head of a gnome, his high hat doubled by a hat of snow, looked out over the drifted lawn, as he had been doing for years and years.

"The Junipers'," Sophie said.

"What?"

"It was the Junipers'," Sophie said. "Their cottage."

There was an old, old woman there, the oldest (except for Mrs. Underhill and her daughters) Lilac had ever seen. She opened her door, held up a lamp, and said in a small old voice, "Friend or Foe? Oh, my," for she saw then that a nearly naked child, barefoot and hatless, stood before her on the path.

Margaret Juniper did nothing foolish; she only opened the door so that Lilac could enter if she liked, and after a moment Lilac decided that she would, and went in and down the tiny hall across the scatter rug and past the knickknack shelf (long undusted, for Marge was afraid of breaking things with her old hands, and couldn't any longer see the dust anyway) and through the arched doorway into the parlor, where a fire was lit in the stove. Marge followed with the lamp, but then at the doorway wasn't sure she wanted to enter; she watched the child sit down in the maple chair with broad paddle arms that had been Jeff's, and put her hands flat on the arms, as though they pleased or amused her. Then she looked up at Marge.

"Can you tell me," she said, "am I on the right road for Edgewood?"

"Yes," Marge said, Somehow not surprised to be asked this.

"Oh," Lilac said. "I have to bring a message there." She held up her hands and feet to the stove, but didn't seem to be chilled through; and Marge didn't wonder at that either. "How far is it?"

"Hours," Marge said.

"Oh. How many."

"I never walked there," Marge said.

"Oh. Well, I'm a fast walker." She jumped up then, and pointed inquiringly in a direction, and Marge shook her head No, and Lilac laughed and pointed in the opposite direction. Marge nodded Yes. She stood aside for the child to pa.s.s her again, and followed her to the door.

"Thank you," Lilac said, her hand on the door. Marge chose, from a bowl by the door of mixed dollar bills and candy with which she paid the boys who shoveled her walk and split her wood, a large chocolate, and offered it to Lilac, who took it with a smile, and then rose on tiptoe and kissed Marge's old cheek. Then she went out and down the path, and turned toward Edgewood without looking back.

Marge stood in the door watching her, filled with the odd sensation that it had been only for this tiny visit that she had lived her whole long life, that this cottage by the roadside and this lamp in her hand and the whole chain of events which had caused them to be had always and only had this visit for their point. And Lilac too, walking fast, remembered just then that of course she was to have visited that house, and said what she did say to the old woman therea"it was the taste of the chocolate that reminded hera"and that by next evening, an evening as still and blue as this one or stiller, everyone in the pentacle of five towns around Edgewood would know that Marge Juniper had had a visitor.

"But," Sophie said, "You can't have walked here since eveninga ."

"I walk fast," Lilac said; "or maybe I took a shortcut."

Whatever way she had taken had led her past a frozen lake and a lake island all glittering in starlight, where a little pillared gazebo stood up, or perhaps it was only snow-shapes that suggested such a place; and through woods, waking a chickadee; and past a place, a sort of castle iced with snow a "The Summer House," Sophie said.

a a place she'd seen before, from above, in another season long ago. She came toward it through what had been the flower beds that bordered its lawn, gone wild now and with only the tall dead stalks of hollyhock and mullein standing above the snow. There were the gray bones of a canvas sling-chair in the yard. She thought, seeing them: wasn't there some message, or some comfort, she was to deliver here? She stood for a moment, looking at the derelict chair and the squat house where not a single footprint went through the snow up to the half-engulfed door, a summery screen door, and for the first time she s.h.i.+vered in the cold, but couldn't remember what the message was or whom it had been for, if there really had been one at all; and so pa.s.sed on.

"Auberon," Sophie said.

"No," Lilac said. "Not Auberon."

She walked through the graveyard, not knowing it to be such; the plot of ground where John Drinkwater had first been buried and then others beside him or near him, some known to him and some not. Lilac wondered at the big carved stones placed at random here and there, like giant forgotten toys. She studied them a while, walking from one to another and brus.h.i.+ng off their caps of snow to look at sad angels, and deep-incised letters, and granite finials, while beneath her feet, beneath the snow and black leaves and earth, stiff bones relaxed, and hollow chests would have sighed if they could have, and old att.i.tudes of attention and expectancy undissolved by death were softened; and (as sleepers do when a troublesome dream pa.s.ses or a bothering noise, the crying of a cat or a lost child, ceases) those asleep there rested more deeply and slept at last truly as Lilac walked above them.

"Violet," Sophie said, her tears flowing freely and painlessly now, "and John; and Harvey Cloud, and Great-aunt Cloud. Daddy. And Violet's father too, and Auberon. And Auberon."

Yes: and Auberon: that Auberon. Standing above him, on the bosom of earth that lay on his bosom, Lilac felt clearer about her message, and her purpose. It was all getting clearer, as though she continued to wake further all the time after waking. "Oh, yes," she said to herself; "oh, yes a" She turned to see, past black firs, the dark pile of the house with not a light showing, as snow-burdened as the firs, but unmistakable; and soon she found a path to there, and a door to go in by, and steps to go up, and gla.s.s-k.n.o.bbed doors to choose from.

"And then, and now," she said, kneeling on the bed before Sophie, "I have to tell you what.

"If I can remember it all."