Little, Big Part 24

"Well," Cloud said with gentle finality. Her brownspotted hand hovered over the box. "Shall I lay out a Rose?"

"May I?" Sophie asked. Cloud withdrew her hand before it touched the box, which might spoil Sophie's control. Attempting Cloud's wasteless gestures, her calm attention, Sophie laid out a Rose.

Six of cups and four of wands, the Knot, the Sportsman, ace of cups, the Cousin, four of coins and queen of coins. The Rose grew out across the drum-table with an iron yet an organic force. If there was no question, as today, the question always was: what is this Rose the answer to? Sophie laid down the central card.

"The Fool again," Cloud said.

"Contention with the Cousin," Sophie said.

"Yes," Cloud said. "But whose cousin? His own, or ours?"

The Fool card in the center of the Rose showed a full-bearded man in armor crossing a brook. Like the White Knight he was in the act of pitching head-first and straight-legged from his brawny horse. His expression was mild, and he looked not into the shallow stream he fell toward, but outward at the viewer, as though what he was doing were intentional, a trick, or possibly an example of something: gravity? In one hand he held a scallop-sh.e.l.l; in the other, some links of sausage.

Before interpretation of any fall could be considered, Cloud had taught Sophie, they must decide how the cards themselves must at this moment be construed. "You can think of them as a story, and then you must find the beginning, middle, and end; or a sentence, and you must pa.r.s.e it; or a piece of music, and you must find the tonic and signature; or anything at all that has parts and makes sense."

"It may be," she said, looking down now at this Rose with a Fool in the middle, "that what we have here isn't a story or an interior, but a Geography."

Sophie asked her what she meant by that, and Cloud said she wasn't at all sure. Her cheek was in her hand. Not a map, or a view, but a Geography. Sophie's cheek was in her hand too, and for a long time she gazed down at the Rose she had made and only wondered; she thought, a Geography, and wondered if it might be that here, that this, thata"but then she closed her eyes and paused a moment, no, there was no question today, please, and not that question of any one.

Wakings-up Lifea"her own life anyway, Sophie had come to think, as it grew longera"was like one of those many-storied houses of dreams she had once been able to build, where the dreamer, with a slow or sudden rush of understanding like a wash of cool water, knows himself to have been merely asleep and dreaming, to have merely invented the pointless task, the grim hotel, the flight of stairs; they go away, tattered and unreal; the dreamer awakes relieved in his own bed (though the bed for a reason he can't quite remember is laid in a busy street or afloat in a calm sea), and rises yawning, and has odd adventures, which go on until (with a slow or sudden rush of understanding) he awakes, he had only fallen asleep here in this desert place (Oh I remember) or (Oh I see) in this palace antechamber, and it's time to be up and about life's business; and so on and on: her life had been of that kind.

There had been a dream about Lilac, that she had been real, and Sophie's. Then she had awakened, and Lilac wasn't Lilac at all: she came to see that, came to see that something dreadful had happened, for no reason she could imagine or remember, and Lilac was neither Lilac nor hers, but something else instead. That dreama"one of the awful kind, the kind where something terrible and irrevocable has happened, something that oppresses the soul with a special, unrelievable griefa"had gone on for nearly two years, and had not truly ended on the night (the night she could still not think about without shudders and involuntary moans, no, not after twenty years) when in desperation, telling no one, she had brought the false thing to George Mouse: and the fireplace: and the blasts, and the phosph.o.r.escence, and the rain and the stars and the sirens.

But anyway, awake or not, she had no more Lilac then at all; her dream was another kind then, the Endless Search, that one where some goal recedes forever, or changes when it is approached, leaving you always with further work to do and, though pressing always on your attention, is never nearer to completion. It was then that she had begun to seek for answers from Cloud and her cards: not only Why, but also How; Who, she supposed she knew, but not Where; and, most important of all, would she ever see, have, hold her real daughter again, and When? Cloud, try as she might, could give no clear answers to these questions, though she held that still the answers must be in the deck and its conjunctions somewhere; and so Sophie began to study their falls herself, feeling that the intensity of her desire might allow her to discover what Cloud could not. But no answer came for her either, and soon she gave it up, and took to her bed again.

But life is wakings-up, all unexpected, all surprising. On a certain November afternoon, twelve years ago, from a certain nap (why that day? Why that nap?) she had awakened from sleeping: from eyes-closed, blankets-up-to-chin, pillow-sleep Sophie awakened, or had been awakened, for good. As though someone (while she slept) had stolen them, her powers of sleeping and escaping into the small dreams within the large had gone away; and Sophie, startled and lost, had had to dream from then on that she was awake, and that the world was around her, and to think what to do with it. It was only then, because her sleepless mind had to have an Interest, any Interest, that (without any hard question, without any question at all) she had taken up the study of the cards, beginning at the beginning humbly as Cloud's tutee.

And yet, though we wake, though there is no end to waking and saying Oh I see, not ever (Sophie knew it and was patient), still within the dream in which we find ourselves every other dream is nested, every one we have awakened from. Sophie's hard first question to the cards had not, precisely, gone without an answer, it had been trans.m.u.ted into questions about the question. It had branched and rooted like a tree, growing questions like buds, and then at some moment all the questions had become one question: what tree is this? And as her study progressed, as she s.h.i.+fted and shuffled and laid out in geometrical figures the greasy, comerless, speaking cards, the question intrigued her further, involved her, at last absorbed her utterly. What tree is this? And yet always at its base, between its roots, beneath its branches, still unfound and growing unfindable, a lost child lay asleep.

No Going Back Out Six of cups and four of wands, the Knot, the Sportsman. The queen of coins reversed. The Cousin: contention with the Fool in the middle of the deck. A Geography: not a map, or a view, but a Geography. Sophie looked down at the puzzle of it, s.h.i.+fting her consciousness across it, paying attention without quite paying attention, p.r.i.c.king up the ears of her thought and easing them again as hints of speech proceeded from and then retired back into the gabble of the cards' alignments.

Then: "Oh," Sophie said, and again "Oh," as though suddenly in receipt of bad news. Cloud looked up at her questioningly, and saw Sophie pale and shocked, eyes wide with surprise and pitya"pity for her, Cloud. Cloud looked down again at the Geography, and yes, in a twinkling it had contracted, like those optical illusions where a complex urn becomes without your choosing it two faces regarding each other. Cloud was used to these vagaries, and to this message; Sophie evidently was not yet.

"Yes," she said softly, and smiled at Sophie, rea.s.suringly she hoped. "You hadn't seen that before?"

"No," Sophie said, both in answer and in denial of what was there in the linked gavotte of cards. "No."

"Oh, I've seen it before." She touched Sophie's hand. "I don't think, though, that we need tell the others, do you? Not just yet." Sophie was weeping, softly, but Cloud chose to ignore it. "It's the difficult thing, the hard thing, about secrets," she said, as though in some small annoyance at the fact, but really pa.s.sing on to Sophie in the only way she could hope to, the last, the only important lesson about reading these cards. "Sometimes you really don't want to know them. But once you do, there's no going back out; no unlearning them. Well. Now buck up. There's still a lot you can learn."

"Oh. Aunt Cloud."

"Shall we study our Geography?" Cloud said, and picked up her cigarette, and inhaled smoke gratefully, voluptuously, and breathed it out again.

Slow Fall of Time Cloud moved crabwise amid the furniture of the house, down three stairs (the note of her sticks changing as she went from wood to stone) and through the puzzle of the imaginary drawing-room where a tapestry on the wall moved in a draft with spooky life. Then the stairs upward.

There were three hundred and sixty-five stairs within Edgewood, her father told her. The left-hand stick, the right-hand foot, right-hand stick, left-hand stick, left-hand foot. There were as well seven chimneys, fifty-two doors, four floors, and twelvea"twelve what? There must be twelve of something, he wouldn't have left that out. Right-hand stick, left-hand foot, and a landing where a lancet window poured a pearly stain of winter light on the dark wood. Smoky had seen an ad in a magazine for a sort of chair-elevator to move old folks up and down stairs; it even tilted up to deposit the aged body at its chosen floor. Smoky pointed this out to Cloud, but she had said nothing. An object of perhaps some abstract interest, but why was he showing it to her? That's what her silence said.

Upward again, the minute risersa"nine inches exactlya" growing ever more cliffy no matter how big she was herself, no matter that the banisters shouldered her and the coffered ceiling pressed on her bent neck. It was wrong in her, she thought as she toiled, not to have warned Sophie of what she, Cloud, had for a long time known about, what had become a kind of recurrent obbligato in her recent readings of the cards, a memento mori that could show up in any fall cast for any person; but it was so constant lately that Cloud had really ceased to notice it. She didn't anyway need, at her huge age, any reminders in her cards of what was obvious to anyone, and most of all to her. It was no secret. She was packed and ready.

Those of her treasures which had not already been distributed were all labeled for the ones they were meant for, the jewelry, Violet's things, stuff she had never really considered hers anyway. And the cards would of course be Sophie's; that was a relief. She had made over the house and grounds and rents to Smoky, an unwilling Smoky; he would be caretaker, good conscientious man! Not that the house couldn't in the main take care of itself. It couldn't come apart, not anyway until the Tale was all told, if thena"but there was no thinking about that, that was no excuse not to execute legal instruments, make wills and make repairs. Alone of them all, Great-aunt Cloud still remembered Violet's instructions: forget. She had acted so well on those instructions that she supposed that her nieces and nephews and grand- and great-grand-nieces and nephews really had forgotten, or never quite learned, what they must forget or needn't learn. Perhaps, like Daily Alice, they thought it had all Somehow slipped out of their reach, each generation slipping further from it as the inexorable slow fall of time was consumed to embers, the embers to ashes, the ashes to cold clinkers, each generation losing something of the last's close connection, or easy access, or quick understanding, the times when Auberon could photograph them or Violet wander in their realms and return with news now the dim fabulous past: and yet (Cloud knew it to be so) each generation in fact grew closer to it, and only ceased to search or bother themselves about it because they felt fewer and fewer distinctions between themselves and it. And, upon a time, there would be no searching at all for a way in. Because there they would be.

The Tale, she thought, would end with them: with Tacey, and Lily, and Lucy; with lost Lilac, wherever she was; with Auberon. Or with their children at the latest. This conviction grew, as she grew older, rather than fading; and that was the clue in these matters that she knew to trust. And it was a shame, a d.a.m.n shame, she thought, that she had lived nearly to a hundred (at the cost of great effort, and not only on her part) and yet wouldn't live to see the end.

Last stair. She put her stick on it, one foot, the other stick, the other foot. She stood stock still while the clamor of effort subsided in her body.

A Fool, and a Cousin; a geography, and a death. She had been right, that every fall of the cards was related to every other. If she read a fall for George Mouse and saw a vista of corridors, or for Auberon and saw the dark girl he would love and lose, that was not different from searching for lost Lilac, or glimpsing the dim lineaments of the Tale, or reading the fate of the Great World itself. How that could be, how each secret revealed could encode another, or all others, why behind a fall that showed a grand Geographya"empires, frontiers, a final battlea"there should appear one old woman's death, she couldn't tell; perhaps, probably, it couldn't be told. Her dismay at this was mitigated by her old resolution, her promise to Violet: that even if she could tell, she wouldn't.

She looked down the mountain of stairs she had just barely, had almost not conquered; and, weakened and slowed more by sad understanding than by any arthritis, she turned toward her room, certain now she would not ever go down them again.

The next morning Tacey came, packed for a long visit, bringing needlework to pa.s.s the time. Lily and the twins were already there. Lucy came at evening, not surprised to find her sisters there, and settled in with them, with her needlework, to help and watch and wait.

Princess Before anyone else could have perceived morning in the somber air above Old Law Farm, the c.o.c.k crew and woke Sylvie. Auberon beside her stirred. She was pressed against his long, unconscious warmth, and felt a mystery in being awake next to his sleep. She eontemplated it, rooting gently in the warmth, thinking that it was odd that she knew she was awake and he asleep, and that he knew neither; and in thinking so, she slept again. But the c.o.c.k called her name.

She rolled over carefully, so as not to enter the colder frontier of the bed's edge, and put her head out. She should wake him. It was his turn to milk, his last day. But she couldn't bring herself to do that. How would it be if she did it for him, a gift. She imagined his grat.i.tude, and weighed it against the cold dawn and the stairs downward, the wet farmyard and the labor. The grat.i.tude seemed to win, she could feel it the more intensely, could feel it almost as a grat.i.tude of hers toward him. "Aw," she said, grateful for her own kindness, and slipped out of bed.

Swearing terribly and softly she took the stool in the closet, not quite putting her flesh against its iciness, and then in a quick, Chinese-stepping crouch, blowing through her chattering teeth, hunted up her clothes and put them on. Her hands shook with cold and hurry as she did up b.u.t.tons.

A hard life, she thought with pleasure as she breathed the foggy air out on the fire escape, pulling on brown gardener's gloves; a hard life, this farm-laborer's life. She went down. Outside the door of George's kitchen hallway was a bag of selected garbage for the goats, to be mixed with their meal. She shouldered this, and slopped across the yard to the goats' apartment, hearing them stirring.

"Hi, guys," she said. The goatsa"Punchita and Nuni, Blanca and Negrita, Guapo and La Grani and the unnamed ones (George had never named any of them, and Sylvie's inspiration hadn't yet reached two or three, of course they must all have names but the right names)a"looked up, clattered on the linoleum, shat, and gave voice. The smell of their garden apartment was vivid. Sylvie wondered if she remembered it from childhood, it seemed to suit her nostrils so well.

She fed them, measuring grain and garbage into the bathtub with a nice eye and mixing it carefully as though it were a child's formula; she talked to them, criticizing faults and praising virtues even-handedly but reserving special affection for the black kid and for the oldest, La Grani, a granny indeed, all backbone and s.h.i.+n, "like a bicycle," Sylvie said. Arms crossed, leaning on the jamb of the bathroom door, she watched them chew with a sidewise motion and raise their heads in rotation to look at her and then down again to their breakfast.

Morning light had begun to enter the apartment. The flowers on the wallpaper awoke, and those on the linoleum, neglected beds and growing indiscernible year by year under dirt, even with all of Brownie's sweeping and mopping in the night. She yawned widely. Why do animals get up so early? "Up and at *em, huh," she said. "Late for work. Dummies."

She thought, as she prepared for milking: look what love makes me do. And she stopped for a moment, feeling warmth suddenly poured into her heart and loins, for she hadn't before used the word about her feelings for Auberon. Love, she said again to herself; and yes, there was the feeling, the word was like a swallow of rum. For George Mouse, her buddy for life, no matter what, who had taken her in when she had no place else, she felt deep grat.i.tude and a complex of other feelings, mostly good; but not this heat, like a flame with a jewel held at its heart. The jewel was a word: love. She laughed. Love. Nice to be in love. Love disguised her in a peacoat and brown gloves, love sent her to the goats and warmed her hands in her armpits for the goats' udders. "Okay, okay, take it easy," she said, gently, to them and to the love disguised in labor. "Take it easy, we're coming."

She stroked Punchita's udders. "Hey, big t.i.ts. Ay mami. Where'd you get them big t.i.ts. You find them under a bush?" She worked, thinking of Auberon asleep in his bed, and George asleep in his; she alone awake, and all unknown. Found under a bush: a foundling. Saved from the City, taken within these walls, and put to work. In the stories, the foundling always turns out to be some high type person left for dead or something by mistake; a princess no one knows. Princess: that's what George always called her. Hey Princess. A lost princess, enchanted and robbed of her memory of being a princess; a goat-girl, but if you tore off the dirty goat-girl clothes, there would be the sign, the jewel, the birthmark, the silver ring, everybody amazed, everybody laughing. Quick streams of milk rang against the bucket, and then hissed in rising foam, left, right, left, right, calming and bemusing her. And then come into her kingdom, after all the work: grateful for the humble shelter, and humbled herself to have found true love there: so all you guys get to be free, and get gold. And the hand of the princess. She leaned her head against Punchita's hairy warm flank, and her thoughts turned into milk, to wet leaves, baby animals, snails' sh.e.l.ls, faun's feet.

"Some princess," Punchita said. "Lots of labor there."

"Whudjoo say?" Sylvie said, looking up, but Punchita only turned her long face to Sylvie, and went on chewing her endless gum.

Brownie's House Out into the yard, with a jar of fresh milk and a new-laid brown egg she had taken from under a hen who nested in the exploded sofa which stood still in the living room of the goats' apartment. She crossed the humpy vegetable patch to a building on the other side, a building clad in brown vines, with tall sad blind windows and stairs that led up to no door. Behind and below the stairs a tiny damp areaway led to the bas.e.m.e.nt; miscellaneous broken boards and gray slats were nailed up over its entrance and windows; you could peek in, but could see nothing in the darkness. Hearing Sylvie's approach, there swarmed out from within the bas.e.m.e.nt several mewling cats, some of the Farm's cat troops, George said sometimes that at his Farm they grew mostly bricks and raised mostly cats. A big, flat-headed, one-eyed thug was king down there; he didn't deign to appear. But a delicate calico did, hugely pregnant the last time Sylvie had seen her. Not now, though; skinny, depleted, with flaccid stomach and big pink t.i.tties. "You got kittens, you?" Sylvie said in reproach. "And didn't tell n.o.body? You!" She stroked her, and poured milk for them, and, hunkering down, peered through the slats. "Wish I could see," she said. "Kitties."

They roamed around her for a time as she looked in, but she could see only a pair of big yellow eyes: the old guy's? Or Brownie's? "Hi, Brownie," she said, for that was Brownie's house too, she knew, though no one had ever seen him in it. Leave him alone, George always said, he gets along okay. But Sylvie always said h.e.l.lo. She sealed the jar of milk, half-full, and with the egg put it just inside the bas.e.m.e.nt, on a ledge there. "Okay, Brownie," she said. "I'm going. Thanks."

That was a ruse, in a way, for she waited, hoping to catch a glimpse. Another cat appeared. But Brownie stayed within. She rose then, and stretching, started back toward the Folding Bedroom. Morning had come to the Farm, foggy and soft, not so cold after all. She stopped a moment, in the center of the high-walled City garden, feeling sweetly blessed. Princess. Hmp. Under her dirty goat-girl clothes were only yesterday's underwear. Soon she's have to think about getting a job, making some plans, getting her story under way again. But for this moment, in love and safe, ch.o.r.es done, she felt she needn't go anywhere at all, or do anything else, and her story would unfold anyway, clearly and happily.

And endlessly. She knew, for a moment, that her story was endless: more endless than any kid's fairy-tale, more endless than "A World Elsewhere" and all its complications. Endless. Somehow. She strode across the Farm, hugging herself, breathing in the farm's rich animal and vegetable exhalations, and smiling.

From deep within his house, Brownie watched her go, smiling too. He took, with his long hands and without a sound, the jar of milk and the egg from the shelf where Sylvie had put them; he drew them within his house, he drank the milk, he sucked the egg, he blessed his queen with all his heart.

A Banquet She undressed as quickly as she had dressed, leaving only her panties, as Auberon, awaking, watched from within the bedclothes; then she hurried, making small cries, to climb in with him, climb down into warmth, warmth she deserved (she felt) as no other did, warmth where she ought always to be. Auberon retreated, laughing, from her cold hands and feet that sought him, sought his sleep-soft and helpless flesh, but then surrendered; she pressed her cold nose into the crook of his neck to warm it, moaning like a dove, as his hands took hold of her panties' elastic.

At Edgewood, Sophie laid one card on another, knight of wands on queen of cups.

Later Sylvie said: "Do you have thoughts?"

"Hm?" said Auberon. His nakedness draped in his overcoat, he was building a fire.

"Thoughts," Sylvie said. "Then. I mean during then. I have lots, almost like a story."

He saw what she meant, and laughed. "Oh, thoughts," he said. "Then. Sure. Crazy thoughts." He built the fire hurriedly, heedlessly throwing in most of the wood left in the woodbox. He wanted it hot in the Folding Bedroom, hot enough to draw Sylvie out from the blankets she sheltered beneath. He wanted to see her.

"Like now," she said. "This time. I was wandering."

"Yes," he said, for he had been too.

"Children," she said. "Babies, or baby animals. Dozens, all sizes and colors."

"Yes," he said. He'd seen them too, "Lilac," he said.

"Who?"

He blushed, and stabbed the fire with a golf club that was kept there for that purpose. "A friend," he said. "A little girl. An imaginary friend."

Sylvie said nothing, only wandered in thought, still not quite returned. Then, "Who again?" she said.

Auberon explained.

At Edgewood, Sophie turned down a trump, the Knot. She was looking, not having chosen to look but once again looking, for a lost child of George Mouse's and her fate, but couldn't find them. Instead she found, and the more she looked the more she went on finding, another girl, and not lost; not lost now, but searching. Past her the kings and queens marched, rank on rank, speaking each his message: I am Hope, I am Regret, I am Idleness, I am Unlooked-for Love. Armed and mounted, solemn and minatory, they went on progress through the dark wood of the trumps; but apart from them, unseen by them, glimpsed only by Sophie, moving brightly amid dark dangers, a princess none of them knew. But where was Lilac? She turned down the next card: it was the Banquet.

"So whatever happened to her?" Sylvie asked. The fire was hot, and the room warming.

"Just what I told you," Auberon said, parting the skirts of his coat to warm his b.u.t.tocks. "I never saw her again after that day, at the picnic a"

"Not her," Sylvie said. "Not the made-up one. The real one. The baby."

"Oh." He seemed to have been propelled forward several centuries since his arrival in the City; trying to remember Edgewood at all now was an effort, but to search in childhood was to dig up Troy. "You know, I don't really know. I mean I don't think I was ever told the whole story."

"Well, what happened, though." She moved luxuriously within the sheets, warming too. "I mean did she die?"

"I don't think so," Auberon said, shocked at this notion. For a moment he saw the whole story through Sylvie's eyes, and it seemed grotesque. How could his family have lost a baby? Or if it hadn't been lost, if the explanation were simple (adoption, death even) then how could it be that he didn't know it? In Sylvie's family history there were several lost babies, in Homes or fostered; all were minutely remembered, all mourned. If he had been capable just then of any emotion other than that directed toward Sylvie and his plans for her in the next moments, he would have felt anger at his ignorance. Well, it didn't matter. "It doesn't matter," he said, glad to know it didn't. "I give up on it all."

She yawned hugely, and tried to speak at the same time, and laughed. "I said so you're not going back?"

"No."

"Even after you find your fortune?"

He didn't say I've found it, though it was true; he'd known it since they'd become lovers. Become lovers: like a wizardry, like frogs become princes.

"You don't want me to go back?" he said, doffing the overcoat and climbing on the bed.

"I'd follow you," she said. "I would."

"Warm?" he said, drawing down the quilt that covered her.

"Hey," she said. "Ay, que grande."