The Solitudes

by John Crowley

  “This is exactly why I don’t do divorces,” Allan said, massaging his brow. “I just really can’t take it.”

  “What now,” Rosie said. “What now.”

  Allan cleared his throat vigorously, and drew out a long yellow pad and one of the new sharpened pencils he always had (never dull or short, what did he do with used ones?), and tugged at his ear. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. What we have to try to do is come to an agreement now, you and Mike and his attorney and I, about various matters pertaining to your life with Mike, and try to make it as mutually acceptable as possible, and simple enough that even the judge can understand it.

  “So let’s see. Let’s make a list. First is custody, of, of …”

  “Sam. Samantha. I’ll get custody.”

  “Uh-huh.” He didn’t write. “And Mike?”

  “I’m sure Mike won’t want custody. We haven’t really made it clear though.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I mean it’s clear to me.”

  Allan favored her with a smile, a smile of almost professional approval, and wrote. “Well and you’ve got to be clear too about visiting rights, support, some kind of decision-making process about insurance, and schooling, and who informs who about when the kid goes to the dentist, the hospital. …”

  “Okay.”

  “As long as you’re still talking,” Allan said. “If attorneys do it, it costs more, and maybe you get an agreement nobody likes but the attorneys.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Her heart had filled. Sam.

  “Support?” Allan said. “Are you working now?”

  “I was,” Rosie said. “Teaching art, at the Sun School.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “But it looks like they don’t need me now.” It looked like the little alternative school, housed in a small made-over mill in Stonykill, was going out of business, declining into mess and recriminations.

  “If you can,” Allan said, “it might be best to stay unemployed. Till after the decree.” He drew a line across his pad. “Okay. Property to divide …”

  “Not really anything,” Rosie said. “A house, but the hospital paid the down payment and holds the mortgage, so. And then stuff. Just stuff.”

  “Stuff,” said Allan, nodding. “Stuff.” The way he had of speaking, that seemed to weight all his words with a huge burden of feeling: Rosie thought it must be a trick of some kind, or an effect he wasn’t really conscious of. But then again maybe not, maybe he did feel the woes and pains of his clients as deeply as he seemed to: maybe, like a practiced weightlifter, he was able to support a larger burden than most people. A cowlick had sprung up from his plastered black hair, and his eyes were sad again. Rosie found herself liking him a lot. “I don’t care about it,” she said. “I don’t really want any of it.”

  “Sure,” Allan said. “You know, back when I did do a lot of divorces, everybody always said, ‘I don’t want any of it, let her have it, let him have it.’ And you know what all the awful arguments, all the pain was always about? Stuff.”

  “Are you married?” Rosie asked.

  “I used to sit here and listen to people grieving about a car, a TV, jewelry, a goddamn set of porch furniture, and I would think, how petty can people be, can’t they rise above all that? Didn’t their love mean more to them than these materialistic details? It took me some time to figure out that love is in the details. It’s in the books and records and the stereo and the convertible. Love is always in the details. And that’s where the pain is too.” His eyes, sadder even, were on her, and his white hands folded before him. “Not married,” he said. “It’s a long story.”

  “I’ve been wondering something,” Rosie said, beginning once again to swivel in her chair. “You know the old castle down in the middle of the river, on the island?”

  “Butterman’s.”

  “Was that you who built it, your family I mean?”

  “Well sort of. Some distant connection. I’ve never worked it all out.”

  “I hear I own it. That the family owns it.”

  “I think that’s right.”

  She smiled. “Not part of the settlement,” she said, and Allan laughed, the first time she had seen him do so. “What I’ve always wanted to do,” she said, “was go and go in. I never have.”

  “Neither have I.”

  “You want to, sometime?” She stretched out in her chair. “You being the family lawyer, and all.”

  He strummed his pencil on the leather drumtop of his desk. “I wanted to give you one funny piece of advice,” he said. “You know that even if this no-fault approach works out, it’s going to be about a year from the trial date before your divorce is final.”

  “Oh my God really?”

  “Six months after the trial, you get a judgment nisi. Nisi is Latin for ‘unless.’ Unless something untoward comes up. Then there’s a ‘nisi period’—six more months, for you guys to think about it, and decide maybe you don’t want it—”

  “Hmp.”

  “Or more importantly when you can file objections to the settlement. Objections saying that the other party acted fraudulently, or that new facts have come to light. Say, new facts relating to making a correct decision about custody.”

  Rosie said nothing.

  “People don’t always know how they feel at first,” Allan said gently. “They can change their minds. And if they do change their minds, and if they do want to do something other than what they agreed to do at first, then they’re going to be looking for grounds on which to make an objection. And they have a whole year to look. Okay?”

  Rosie began to understand; she lowered her eyes, feeling reproached.

  “All I want to say,” Allan said, even more gently, “is that if uncomplicated custody is what you want, and what you can get now, then my advice to you is to be a model single parent until those final papers come. If you need to know what one is, I’ll spell it out. And if you can’t be a model single parent—if you can’t be—then Rosie you ought to be a damn careful one.”

  Before she left town that day, Rosie stopped at the library, to return her latest Fellowes Kraft novel, and take out another. The one she returned was The Court of Silk and Blood; the one she chose, without much thought, was called A Passage at Arms, and had a seascape, galleons, and a compass rose on the cover. Afternoon was late when she drove out of the Jambs, autumn afternoon closing suddenly.

  The things, she thought: the cars and house and stuff, all that to deal with. No marriage could be over till that was done. Hm.

  She thought that probably Mike would find the stuff a big problem, but Mike was a Capricorn, a holder-on to things, and their disposition would always strike him as requiring a lot of thought. Rosie, however much of her soul she might hide in a pair of dangle earrings or a box made of inlaid woods, only and always avoided stuff: life, it sometimes seemed to her, was an obstacle race, full of stuff to be leaped, skirted, lost and left behind. In her own natal chart (still in its manila envelope, now somewhat crushed, on the seat beside her), the second house—Lucrum, “like lucrative,” Val said, “money, possessions, jobs, stuff like that”—was empty of compelling planets.

  The sun set, leaving a glassy lavender and peach twilight in the cloudless West. In the mountains above Rosie’s station wagon, deer walked, fattening on the apples of old orchards; down on the river, fallen leaves floated south, gathering in colored rugs at eddies and backwaters and on the shore of the little pleasure-ground that Spofford owned. At nightfall, a flock of migrating starlings returning to the towers of Butterman’s made a banner in the air above the castle that snapped, as though in the wind, before the birds settled to rest.

  By lamplight Rosie read A Passage at Arms, about buccaneers on the Spanish Main. That magician character who took Shakespeare’s picture in Bitten Apples, the one whose crystal ball Boney had shown her, appeared in it, lending maps to Sir Francis Drake, plotting with the Queen against the Spanish. Rosie wondered whether really all of Kraft’s books were sections out of
the one story, cut out and offered individually, as a landscape painter might cut up a big view into little ones framed separately. The English won out over the Spanish, but the Spanish king, brooding spiderlike in his magic palace, planned revenge. Rosie took it back (late and foxed with autumn rain, Sam had left it outdoors) and chose another.

  She would read them all, in the end; she would read them in Allan Butterman’s waiting room and in waiting rooms at the courthouse and the accountant’s office (the affairs of her dissolving family were an impenetrable mess). She would read them standing on lines at the bank and the Registry of Motor Vehicles. She would read Sam to sleep with them, who at bedtime cared more to hear the peaceful sound of her mother’s voice making grown-up sense than any story Sam herself would be required to grasp. She would put them down when her eyelids trembled to close, often past midnight, and pick them up when she woke, way too early to rise, before Mrs. Pisky or even Sam was afoot.

  Yet Rosie was not, actually, a great reader. Cumulatively, she had not read a lot in her life; in normal times a thick book, a long tale, held no special attraction. Only at certain times, as though it were an old fever contracted in childhood and breaking out periodically, did she fall into books; and when she fell in she fell all in. It was escape: she was quite clear about that. Often she had known just what it was she was escaping from—though during her first year married to Mike, the year of John Galsworthy, she hadn’t known; and she hadn’t at all understood the first outbreak, in some ways the severest, the year her family moved to the Midwest and Rosie worked her way steadily and blurrily through not only the collected Nancy Drew but all of Mr. Moto and the Biography shelf of a branch library too, reading lives that did not strike her as materially different from fictions, learning facts she would never altogether forget or ever remember exactly about Amelia Earhart, W. C. Handy, Albert Payson Terhune, Pearl Mesta, Woodrow Wilson, and a host of others. That year she walked continually in her life carrying another life, the one inside books, the one that engaged her the more intimately; her living was divided in two, reading and not reading, as completely and necessarily as it was divided into sleeping and being awake.

  No more than about waking life did it occur to Rosie to pass critical judgments on what she read. It engaged her or it didn’t; when it engaged her she could not have said why. Never, in her intense period of reading mystery stories, did it occur to her to try to figure out what the author was up to, what the solution was; she thought once, looking back, that she hadn’t really grasped initially that these stories she liked were mysteries, that each one would have a solution; if she had read one that didn’t, she would not necessarily have felt cheated. What she really liked about them, she thought, was the same thing she liked about biographies: they went only one way.

  There was a kind of novel that didn’t, and made Rosie feel uneasy: a kind of novel that it seemed you could only go about halfway or two-thirds into before you somehow started coming back out. All the incidents and characters that appeared in the first half of the book, the ones that created the story, would reappear (sometimes even in approximately reverse order) to complete the story, as though the book’s second half or last third were a mirror image of the first, with the ending exactly like the beginning except that it was an ending. It wasn’t that such books didn’t resemble life; Rosie didn’t know if they did or didn’t; but if they did, then it might be that life too had a mirror end, that its direction all one way was illusory, and Rosie didn’t know this to be so only because she hadn’t entered on the later, the cursory wrap-up part of her own life.

  Once when she had picked up a novel at a tag sale she had found pasted on the fly leaf a yellowed newspaper review of it. The review seemed to like the book but complained of its somewhat mechanical plot. When Rosie read it she found it to be one of those with a mirror final third. So what she had been perceiving all along (she realized with surprise) was plot—a thing she might have said novels have and biographies do not, without knowing just what she meant by saying that. And now she knew.

  And still she didn’t know to what extent lives resembled novels by having plots, by having symmetries, falling into two parts, the long way in, the quicker way back out again. Certainly there was something mechanical about this picture; but there was no way—yet—to know whether life was in fact mechanical and symmetrical, or not. For sure when she sat with a Kraft novel in her lap, waiting in offices to further her divorce from Mike, it didn’t seem an academic question; she thought she might very well be just halfway through her own story (if it had a halfway mark) and that so far from ditching her husband she was only establishing the conditions of his later and ineluctable appearances in the story. Which was his story too after all.

  Kraft wasn’t much help. Despite the forward tumble of history always proceeding in his books, proceeding (with an almost audible roar and mutter) from far past toward nearer past, all one way, the stories themselves that he told often had the mirror-shape of a plot. Bitten Apples had such a shape: right in the center of it that magician or scientist drew the diagram of young Will’s horoscope, and put his planets in, and told him that he would not, unless he chose to fly in the heavens’ face, make his living as a player upon the stage. And from there, scene by scene, the book walked back out through itself with great neatness. Rosie guessed that it would (saying “Oh no” aloud in comic dismay at breakfast so that Boney raised his bent head to see what she groaned at) as soon as Simon Hunt—Will’s old teacher in Stratford, who snuck off to be a priest—appeared again before Will in London.

  Now it was Hunt who was at bay, Hunt hunted, a Jesuit, a price on his head. Will, though tempted (only for a shameful second) to turn him in, saves the frightened priest, hiding him at one critical moment in full view of Walsingham’s patrol: on stage, playing a farcical monk in an anti-Papist play, dragged down to hell by devils.

  Good scene for a movie, Rosie thought.

  And at the end Will was on tour of the provinces, and coming once again to Stratford by the Avon; at seventeen feeling old, and worldly-wise, and done with playing. The last long scene with his chastened father—as exactly distant, almost to the number of pages, from the end of the book as the very first interview was from the beginning. Come home, Will. Forgive me: forgive me.

  And yet—Rosie wondered how it was done—there was not in this perfect symmetry of scenes the oppression she had felt in other books; it was all somehow encouraging. Maybe it was only her own knowledge, acquired outside these pages, of the further history that none of them who were inside the book could know: not John Shakespeare, not James Burbage (saying goodbye to Will by the property-wagon in a Stratford innyard, brushing away a kindly tear but thinking himself well rid of the tall young man), not Will Shakespeare himself, turning back up the High Street for home.

  It was time to settle down; time to take up his father’s trade: a clean trade, however unexciting, that could support a man’s age.

  That could support—Will felt his heart rise, though his big sober feet fell in good order in the High Street—that could support a wife, and sons. A dark-eyed wife of Stratford town.

  And if he worked steadily, he might one day erase from the town’s long memory his adventure in London, and earn for himself the name of good citizen, credit to the town of Stratford—even, maybe, Gentleman.

  Will went up to his father’s door, his hand on the butt of an imaginary Gentleman’s sword, slung at his side. In the innyard, Burbage’s players set up the stage for the old play of Cæsar, stabbed in the Capitol.

  Oh, corny, corny, Rosie thought almost laughing with pleasure, for there at the bottom of the last page, in large capitals, was not “The End” but

  THE BEGINNING.

  SIX

  One lamb had died; it lay, a wet lump, near its mother, who nuzzled it dazedly. Farther down the shed, a ewe had died delivering: beside her, a living lamb attempted to suck. Spofford lifted his lantern, in whose light his breath clouded, and carefully numbered them, so w
eary he almost could not keep count. The rest were all right. So: one dead lamb, its mother full of milk; and one motherless lamb. But the living ewe wouldn’t give suck to the orphan; some instinct, smell, something, prevented it. So the orphan lamb would starve, unless Spofford began now to feed it by hand.

  Or he could try an older method, that he had heard of from someone, who, he forgot who; he had in his mind the dim image of an old shepherd who had learned it from an older, and so on back through the years. Well all right.

  He opened his knife, and working swiftly and almost automatically as though he had done this many times before, he took the thin wet skin from the dead lamb, pulling and cutting it free. When he had it, he took up the orphaned lamb, and after bundling it in the pitiful rag of its cousin’s skin, he laid it by the dead lamb’s mother.

  The mother examined it, insofar as she could; she nuzzled it, and found it to be her own. At the disguised lamb’s insistence, she let it suck: let it live.

  How do you like that, Spofford marveled, bloody to the wrists of his sheepskin coat. Now how do you

  “like that,” he said aloud, waking.

  It wasn’t night in February, lambing time, but morning in December. It had snowed in the night, the first snowfall of the year; a white light filled the loft of his cabin, so that he knew without raising his head that it had snowed.

  Boy (he thought, stirring), sometimes they can be so convincing. So convincing.

  He sat up, and scratched his head with both hands. His sheepskin coat hung, clean, on a peg. He laughed aloud: that was a great trick with the lamb. He wondered if it would work. He hadn’t—as far as he remembered—ever heard of it, though as a boy he had once hand-fed an orphaned lamb. For sure the aged shepherd whom, in the dream, he had remembered telling about it (apple-cheeked, with stump of pipe and lamb’s-wool hair) was nobody he knew in waking life, a complete fiction.

  Over breakfast he decided he would ask one or two sheepmen he knew in the county whether that switcheroo was a possibility. Whether it was a well-known old trick.