The Solitudes

by John Crowley

  “Yup,” said Beau.

  Mike roughly took charge of the comic top from her, and she resigned it to him. Her eyes again wandered across Pierce, without recognition.

  Now damn if she doesn’t look exactly like the woman in the library. Ryder? Ryder. Damn if she does not. His confusion had been understandable, it had been more than that, it had been almost necessary. “Her name is Rosie,” he said to Beau, as with a swing of her dark hair she turned away and inserted herself neatly into the driver’s seat.

  “It’s Rose anyway,” Beau said.

  The toy car, open now, putted away, Mike Mucho’s arm flung proprietarily over the back of his wife’s seat. Still chums apparently.

  “So you don’t belong here,” Beau said, lifting Sam with a professional fillip to his shoulders. “You only seem to. You can never say This is where I belong. The best you can say is This is like it. This day, this place. This is like the place where I belong.”

  If that were so (and Pierce did not at all believe it was, he knew what heresy was being spoken here, and knew now what Beau was too) then Pierce would have to say it: This is like, this is a lot like the place where I belong.

  “Come on in,” Beau said. “Have some tea.”

  “Thanks, no,” Pierce said. “Back to the books.” The child on Beau’s shoulders, carried toward the house, looked back, first leftward and then rightward, at Pierce in frank curiosity. And from where had she got those golden curls?

  Laid out on Pierce’s bed together, squared up in two ranks of two, the four volumes of Frank Walker Barr’s collected studies of history showed to Pierce the whole painting that had been cut up in four to make their covers. What it pictured, though, was anybody’s guess: here a man pleaded before lictors; there, a mendicant in rags had come to a classical temple; dark Miltonic beings with bat wings fled away; a flight of angels, or anyway tall and noble ladies, draped, and winged with heavy, pigeon-gray wings, climbed en masse toward an obscurity in the picture’s center, where four corners of the volumes met.

  Cockerel Books. “His” publisher. He hoped that his own volume, if it was ever finished, and if really published, would be pondered by the designer who had done these. If if.

  He swept them up, Time’s body, and pushed them onto a shelf that ran along the left-hand wall; groaning he bent to another boxful of books, and with his jackknife cut the tape that sealed it. Groaning, because his back and limbs still ached from the unwonted exercise of moving furniture, then carrying these boxes up the stairs, and then the lumber for the shelves that he had put up all along the walls of the central room of his apartment, which would be library, bedroom, and workshop all in one. He had hoped to have Spofford’s help with the shelves, but he had not been able to reach him, and so he’d done it himself, quickly, testily, and not excellently. And it had become evident already that there would not be room enough on them for all these books.

  He scooped out two big handfuls, glancing at their spines. His books had gone into their boxes on the basis of size, not content, and these were all little guys, including a paperback cookbook, some old pocket diaries, his childhood Mass book (Our Sunday Missal) and a little Bible, some volumes of the Yale Shakespeare, and the Monas hieroglyphica of John Dee. These handfuls he roughly shoved onto a shelf, extracting only the Dee to go with others of its special kind on the left-hand wall: a small, thin book, bound in red, with the sign, the Monad, stamped on the cover, and appearing again on the title page, reproduced in this cheap edition from the original of 1564:

  In his own book he would have to make something of this sign—how it came to be, and Dr. Dee’s high hopes for it, and its subsequent odd reappearances in the history of Ægypt. He would have to take a shot at explaining it, too, and the power such a thing could once have seemed to embody, a geometric conflation or universal puzzle-ring made of a dozen different glyphs, elemental, planetary, mathematical, a seal of silence and a promise of revelation.

  To do so, of course, he would have to begin to understand it himself, and feel its power; and in fact he did not. He was not unique in this; the scholar who translated the little book had himself felt compelled to interpolate into Dee’s closed-mouthed and gnomic Latin some guesses as to the sense:

  All will be forced to acknowledge it [an] exceedingly rare [event] that (for the everlasting memory of men) this [work] be sealed with my London seal of Hermes, so that in it there may be not even one superfluous dot, and that not one dot may be wanting [in it] to signify those things that we have said (and things far greater yet).

  He turned the page. A warning: Some men may lose themselves in the “labyrinth” of Dee’s thought, “torture their minds in incredible ways [and] neglect their everyday affairs”; others, “imposters and mere spectres of men,” will rashly deny the truths contained herein. Hm.

  What would be nice to have for his own book was a Baroque title page like this one: an engraved portal at once stern and ludicrous, with pillars, lintel, and bases all labeled and emblematic, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, quotes in Latin and Greek on ruffed banners, Mercurius with winged hat and feet, finger to his lips. Above the dedication (to the Emperor Maximilian!) was a motto:

  Qui non intellegit, aut taceat aut discat.

  Which would actually mean, let’s see,

  Let [him] who does not understand [this], either be silent [about it] or learn.

  Well and which was his case? It might be, of course, that you could be both: both fool and imposter, knowing nothing, saying much. He shut the Monas hieroglyphica and slipped it in among the others with whom he would be consorting here, his Secondary Sources: with Kraft’s Bruno, with Barr in his four fat volumes, with Thorndike in six fatter volumes; with Earl’s old astronomy textbook, Lewis and Short’s dictionary and a dictionary of angels; with dozens of others the logic of whose association on the left-hand shelf only Pierce for the moment could discern. Let others learn, or be silent.

  And did he have a dedicatee? He didn’t, though it struck him just then for the first time what a unique gift such a dedication made: so rich and flattering, so costless to give.

  What his book might have (he thought, stepping back and with arms folded regarding the spines of his collection, some of them upside-down) was an author’s note of some kind.

  Yes. An Author’s Note: This book, more even than most books, no, More even than most books are, this is a book made out of other books. The author wishes to acknowledge. Out of whose great and real scholarship, out of whose daring speculations, out of whose. This fantasia on their themes.

  An apology, maybe, in advance, for the uses he intended to put them to, and the company he intended to have them keep.

  He turned away, and opened another box. This one was full of big books: a big dictionary and a big picture book on clocks, some volumes of his 1939 Britannica inherited at Sam’s death, a big Shakespeare and a great big Bible.

  This last (Douai), heavy in his hands, tempted him to a sortilege.

  He put it down on the bed, opened its cover, grasped the thick text, and with his eyes closed riffed the pages. Stopped. With eyes still closed, he put his finger on a text, and warily looked. Isaiah.

  For you shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall sing praise before you, and all the trees of the country shall clap their hands.

  THREE

  Like all of Fellowes Kraft’s books, the little autobiography that Boney gave to Rosie had an epigraph. It was from Love’s Labor’s Lost:

  Welcome the sour cup of prosperity!

  Affliction may one day smile again; and until then

  Sit down, sorrow.

  Which seemed to be a sort of joke when you thought about it; it might be, Rosie thought, that it was the source rather than the quote itself that was significant, because a big theme of the book was Kraft’s search for an Ideal Friend, and the various disappointments, betrayals, forswearings, and lapses the search had entailed, all of them presented so delicately though that Rosie w
ondered whether he could have been unaware of the shape of his nature, was really innocently in pursuit of just a friend, and it was she who had a dirty mind.

  If he was coy about the Ideal Friend, he was frank about royalties and the business of writing. He gave a full accounting of how much he had made on each book, which Rosie found illuminating; enough to live on, apparently, but not enough to live well. There was family money too, though Kraft was a little more secretive about that; and there was the Foundation. Certainly the royalties from books could not have bought the house in Stonykill, or paid for the restless travel Kraft recorded, always hopefully undertaken, always illuminated by art or architecture he found along the way, always leaving an ashen taste: that was because of the Friends, Rosie thought, Nikos and Antonio and the Baron and Cyril and Helmut. There were cloudy photographs of one or two of these men tipped into the book, inside printed frames, with name and place and date; in fact—except for one of a gay and childlike woman a long time ago, in a big hat and summer frock, his mother—those were all the illustrations.

  No, one other: Kraft and two other young men, in a sort of truck on a mountain road, with a picture-book castle white and vague far down the valley behind. Kraft and whoever these others were wore rough clothes, leather shorts and sweaters. Underneath, it said: On expedition in the Giant Mountains, 1937, which Rosie thought was remarkable. She hadn’t come upon anything in the text about this expedition, and didn’t know at all where the Giant Mountains were. Fairyland, maybe.

  She wasn’t, however, reading the book in any sequential way. It lay on her desk (a card table actually, which she had put up in a corner of the office, where she could work) and she would pick it up now and then when she was bored or didn’t know how to go on; reading it, or looking at it, seemed sufficiently related to her job to fill the holes in a workday. She was reading in it on a morning late in May, sitting in Boney’s chair, with her sneakered feet crossed on his desk, though this was not a workday but a Saturday. Boney himself was out on the lawn, bent over a croquet ball, mallet in hand. Deep green lawn, pride of old gardeners, blue-striped ball and mallet. Rosie could see him, when she raised her eyes from the book: practicing.

  “However beautiful we make them, our nests are empty ones,” she read; and she thought she knew who this we was. “We will be solitary, inevitably, like balls struck across a wide lawn, striking others now and then, and being struck by them. We must be glad of that striking; and keep up our courage and our cheer; and not forget the ones we have loved—no, and pray that our remembrance will in turn earn us a place, however little visited, in their hearts.”

  Hm. It struck Rosie that nowadays everyone—no, not everyone, but lots of people she knew—lived the way gay men like Kraft had always lived; in brief collisions, restless, among lovers whom there was no way to fix except for as long as you could hold their hands. And then what? And then remember them, and keep in touch: friends. Maybe there was a lesson there, or a hint: how not to end up empty-handed altogether, if that was the way you had to live.

  She let the creamy pages fall through her fingers toward the last ones. Out on the lawn, Boney swung his mallet neatly, pendulum fashion, before him, and straightened bent knees. Sam, running delighted across the lawn, intercepted the rolling ball. Boney raised a finger; Sam ball in hand looked up to listen, then decided to carry off the ball anyway, shrieking with glee.

  “There is, in Venice, in the church of San Pantalon, one of the most remarkable works of art I know of. It is a Baroque ceiling painting done in eye-fooling perspective by one Fumiani, whom I have heard of in no other context. His work covers the entire ceiling and its coffers as though it were one enormous easel painting; it must tell the story of the Saint, though what that story is I have never learned. Despite the convincing upward leap of its perspective, it doesn’t have the vanishing lightness of Tiepolo, it has a hallucinatory dark clarity, the figures distinct and solidly modeled, the pillars, flights of stairs, thrones, tripods, and incense-smoke so real that their great size and swift recession from the viewer is vertiginous. Most remarkable of all is that, except for a central flight of angels, there is no obvious religious import to any of it: no Virgin, no Christ, no God or Dove, no cross, no haloes, nothing. Nothing but these huge antique figures, associated in a story more than portraying one; pondering, judging, hoping, seeing, alone. The flight of angels ascends not to a Godhead but to an empty, white-clouded center of the sky.

  “Just before he finished this huge work, Fumiani apparently fell from his scaffolding and was killed. Imagine.

  “I first saw the ceiling of San Pantalon (Saint Pantaloon, the old fool’s church?) in 1930, when I was in Europe writing my very first book, Bruno’s Journey. I have gone back to Venice often since then, and Fumiani’s ceiling has been among the things that drew me back. If I could—if I didn’t feel this old Waterman’s I hold to be already running on empty—I would attempt one more book, a book like that ceiling; a book composed of groups ambiguous but clear, great solitudes that look on and look away from each other; a book solemn and darkly bright and joyous in its achievement, as that ceiling is joyous in the immense trick of its perspective; a book empty and infinite at its center. A book that would close the circle of my life as Bruno opened it; a book that I could die before finishing.”

  The hair rose on Rosie’s neck. Actually, though, she knew these enormous thoughts were a little premature, he’d written at least one more whole book after this memoir, was it Under Saturn? Or Darkling Plain? She’d read it, and it didn’t seem very different from the others; just one more. The memoir, she thought, might have been written more at the onset of old age than in the shadow of death.

  Apparently, though, he never did come up with the Ideal Friend. So love’s labor was lost.

  She put down the book, and took her feet from the desk. It was not a workday, but there were lots of things to be done: for this was the first day of the summer’s floating croquet tournament, and the season opener, a premier social occasion, was to be played here at Arcady, on the lawn beyond the office.

  Not all of the top-seeded players would be coming; some were summer people who hadn’t opened their houses yet, some were setting out their tomatoes. She thought Beau and them would come. Allan Butterman had been invited. She hoped Spofford, whom she hadn’t officially seen for some time, would be there; he had (he had said) a scheme to talk to her and Boney about.

  A scheme. She tightened her sneakers’ laces, and, though sure it wasn’t really proper to do so, opened the tall casement and stepped out over the sill onto the lawn, calling her daughter for lunch.

  Neither had Pierce been seeing much of Spofford since he had arrived, Spofford being busy on his land this time of year and having little reason to come into the Jambs. Pierce was making his own way, though, already aware that as a newcomer he was an object of some interest.

  He had got on good terms with Beau and the women of his house, and at Beau’s he had met Val among others; indeed it seemed likely that he would soon have a wider circle of acquaintance in this small town than he had had in the great city, in which he had come to be something of a recluse finally, and from which anyway most of the people he cared about had, one by one, escaped, as he had at last himself.

  As he had himself. On a Saturday he sat in a deep armchair by his open window, able to smell lilacs (a vast old bush of them burdened the stick-and-wire fence that separated the yard of his building from the neighbors’) and hear birds. He was waiting for Val to call up the stairs: for he was going with her and Beau to play croquet of all things. And he was writing in his record book.

  “Persistence of magical thinking in this neighborhood is remarkable,” he wrote. “My neighbor Beau explaining to me yesterday all about the various planetary characters people can have, mercurial, jovial, saturnine, martial, etc. And how good planetary influences can be attracted to counteract the bad ones. Talismans. Seals. He is not getting this from any kind of scholarly endeavor, from any old book; it�
�s just available to him. Yet it’s the same prescriptions Marsilio Ficino worked out for himself 500 yrs. ago. How?”

  He put his pencil between his teeth like a pirate’s dirk, and struggled to rise; he went to the left-hand shelf, sought among the books there, found one, and sought through it as he returned to fall again into the armchair.

  “Val,” he wrote, “is our astrologer, and apparently an extremely important character around here, just as the astrological doctor or cunning woman would have been in any Elizabethan village. She was explaining the other day at the Donut Hole the qualities or contents of the twelve houses of the horoscope. I asked her how she had come by the descriptions she has; she didn’t really have an answer; she’s studied, she says, but what she’s studied seems to be magazines mostly; and she’s thought, and felt—experience, she says, more than anything; but look how her descriptions match the ones Robert Fludd gives in his astrology, in about 1620:”

  He propped open the book on the arm of the chair, to copy from it.

  “Val says Vita is Life, psychological and physical character. Fludd says: life, personality, appearance, and childhood. Lucrum is possessions, money, jobs, Val says; Fludd says property, riches, and house (but Val says it’s also beginnings; first steps; what you do with what you get in Vita). Fratres, Val says, isn’t just brothers and sisters, it’s about family relations and communication of all kinds; more than that, it’s friendship too: your circle in effect. Fludd says”—he had lost the place, and had to search—“brothers and sisters, friendship, faith and religion, and journeys.”

  Well maybe not so exactly identical as he had imagined. How did journeys come in under Fratres? Farther down the list, Pietas, the ninth house, had “travel” in Fludd’s description. Was there a difference between “journeys” and “travel”? Mors, the eighth house, Val had said, isn’t just death, it’s coming to see the larger perspective on life, the cosmic perspective. Fludd’s description was, “Death, work, sadness, inherited diseases, final years.” In general Val’s descriptions were, well, nicer than the seventeenth-century mage’s, more meliorative, always conceiving difficulty and obstacle as growth and struggle on a higher plane.