The Solitudes

by John Crowley

  But why after all did the houses have the characters they had, and not others? And why in the order they came in? Val could explain them as a series, a cumulative expansion out of childhood and personal concerns through socialization and family toward cosmic consciousness, a story in twelve chapters: but that wasn’t really what Pierce was asking. Any twelve notions in a row could probably be satisfactorily interpreted, especially in that esoteric, anagogical way; but that didn’t explain them. He had put it to Val in the Donut Hole: Why did Death come in the eighth place and not in the last? Why eighth and not seventh or ninth? Did Lucrum really deserve its place immediately after Vita? And why did the twelve end, not with the grandest expansion or the darkest finality, but with Carcer, the Prison?

  Beau Brachman had sat listening to their discussion with a faint smile of amusement, as though knowing better, keeping quiet, while Pierce asked questions and Val put forth notions, laughing at her own unhandiness with logical intellection. “Carcer,” Val said, “sorrow, okay? And fear and restriction; but see it’s the individual fate, and coming to see that.”

  “See what?”

  “That your individual fate, this time around, is something you have to drop, and get out of, in death, and rejoin the universe. It’s understanding that.” She looked to Beau. “Right?” But Beau said nothing, only smiled, Pierce had begun to think his smile simply stood in the shape of his mouth, the curve of his neat satyr’s lips, and not in his eye or mind at all.

  Now what did Fludd have for the last house of all? “Hidden enemies, deceivers, jealous persons, evil thoughts, large animals.”

  Large animals?

  Pierce had a sudden inspiration. It popped open in his mind like a bud, and immediately began putting forth petals, unfolding like a time-lapse flower in a nature film, even as Pierce groped for the pencil he had put down.

  “Organize the book according to the twelve houses,” he wrote, “each house a chapter or segment. Somewhere tell story of how 12 houses came to be, how changed meaning over time, but save this till late; let reader ponder, Vita? Lucrum? What’s up, etc.”

  He heard the door below, his front door, open.

  “In Vita, tell how you came to do this investigation. Barr. Childhood. Etc.”

  “Hey, handsome.” Val’s raucous voice from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Okay. Coming.” His pencil hovered over the page. Lucrum, hm. But Fratres the company of thinkers, historians, mages then and now. And Bruno’s journey.

  He got up, putting aside the journal but still writing.

  Mors three-quarters through would be where Bruno burns. But then his legacy—Ægypt, infinity—expanding through Pietas, Regnum, Benefacta.

  Carcer at the end. Carcer. Bruno’s nine years in a cell the size of Pierce’s bathroom. Nine years to recant, and he never did.

  Why are we left at the end in prison?

  He clattered down a few stairs, back up to snatch up his tobacco, matches, the sunglasses he had bought last summer in Fair Prospect. And out and down again to where Val arms akimbo awaited him with mock impatience. He didn’t lock his door behind him, he hadn’t locked his door since he had come to this small town; he had somehow instantly broken ten years of city habits as though he had not lived there at all, and was never to take them up again.

  Some of the games of the summer’s croquet tournament, played on the backyard courts of farmhouses up north, rocky and full of stumps and lost toys, had developed a unique character, and rules of their own; a sort of Obstacle Croquet that some players had got very good at, Spofford among them. But on the billiard-table ground at Arcady croquet was played according to stricter geometries; the crowd tended to be older, and the younger players to be a little abashed by the whites that Boney’s set wore and Mrs. Pisky’s pitcher of lemonade and silver tray of cookies. Pierce, climbing from Val’s Beetle and seeing a warm-up round in progress beyond the rose bushes, expected almost to be handed a flamingo, to roll hedgehogs beneath hoops of playing cards.

  Rosie Rasmussen saw him coming across the lawn with Beau and Val, a big ugly man in a knit shirt holding with odd delicacy a tiny cigarette stub. She knew who he was, for he had been described to her by Spofford and by Val, but she hadn’t yet met him, the new man in the county.

  And Pierce saw her, striking a pose with her mallet and with her hand displaying to him, and to Beau and Val, the lawn around her, the flowers and the day; a rangy, cheerful person, carrot-topped with curly hair, the kind of clear-cut almost horsey features that would keep her long looking pretty good. Not his type though. She shouldered her mallet and came across the lawn to meet him. A sudden burst of chagrined groans and laughter came from the white-clothed players near the post; Val cried out her party laugh; Rosie and Pierce took hands.

  “Hi, I’m Rosie Rasmussen.”

  “Pierce Moffett.”

  “Right,” she said, as though he had guessed correctly. “Welcome to the Faraways.”

  Val called out a hello to people she knew, and began rapidly muttering their histories to Beau beside her. Rosie pointed to the croquet ground. “You play this game?” she asked.

  “I haven’t,” Pierce said. “Oh once or twice. I’m not even sure of the rules.”

  “I’ll show you,” Rosie said. “Couldn’t be simpler.” They walked that way. Pierce looked up at the brown heights of Arcady, its gingerbread and deep eaves, and into the broad veranda where wicker furniture consorted. There were, he was aware, many old houses of this size and age tucked into the hills and glens of the Faraways, turn-of-the-century summer places, modest back then, fabulous now. Spofford, on one drive last summer, had somewhere pointed out the road that led to a big place he said his Rosie’s uncle owned. Somewhere. Eventually, Pierce supposed, the local geography would come to lie right in his mind, its hoops and posts and the paths that led among them.

  “So Spofford got you to come here, right?” Rosie asked.

  “Sort of,” Pierce said. “Mostly. And luck. You know Spofford?”

  “Real well,” she said, smiling and lowering her eyes to the ball she was tapping into place. “How do you like it here?”

  Pierce, soft May airs in his hair and shirt, and the chartreuse hills and changeful clouds in view, thought how to answer. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “If I had three wishes, any wishes, I would think that one had been delivered already, just getting me here, getting me out of the city.”

  Rosie laughed at the silly extravagance of this. “Well and you still got two more.”

  “Those,” Pierce said, “I know how to treat.”

  “You sure?”

  “Oh yes.” He outlined for her, briefly, his theories and conclusions in the matter of wishing, the preparations he had made, the traps he had foreseen.

  “Boy you got all this figured out,” Rosie said.

  “You betcha,” Pierce said. “Be Prepared.”

  “And what makes you think you’ve got to get ready? I mean what are you going to do to get these wishes?”

  “I’m not sure you have to do anything,” Pierce said. “Not to deserve them. They just are offered. Your number comes up. You buy an old lamp at a stall in a bazaar. Your fishing line pulls in the magic fish.”

  “Oh?”

  “Sure. I mean the chances are slim, I admit, but still, why not take the trouble to be ready? The same way you always send in those magazine sweepstake things, even though it’s millions to one.”

  “I never do,” Rosie said.

  “Well in fact,” Pierce said, “neither do I.” His face creased several ways in an asymmetrical grin. Rosie laughed, puzzled by his funny fantastical gravity. How old would he be, thirty or forty? Big hands, she noted; big feet. “Okay you start at the stake,” she said, pointing it out to him. “What color do you want to be?”

  “A matter of indifference.”

  “Spofford said you were writing a book?”

  “I’m going to try to.”

  “Getting paid for it?”

&nbs
p; “Not a lot. Some.”

  “Hey, good for you. About what?”

  Pierce leafed rapidly through the several descriptions he kept within, suitable for different hearers. “It’s about magic and history,” he said. “About magic in history, and also about the history of magic, and magicians.”

  “Wow, interesting. History when?”

  “Well, the Renaissance and a little later. Shakespeare’s time.”

  “Magicians back then, huh,” Rosie said. “Like John Dee?”

  He looked at her in astonishment. “Well yes,” he said. “Among others. How do you come to know that name?”

  “I read about him in a novel. Are you a historian?”

  “I taught history,” Pierce said, unwilling to assign the larger word to himself. “What novel was this?”

  “A historical novel.” She laughed at the obviousness of this. “Of course. By Fellowes Kraft. He used to live around here, and wrote these books.” A look of understanding had begun to cross Pierce’s face, a big understanding, bigger than merely knowing the source of her knowledge of old Dee. Rosie suddenly remembered catching a glimpse of someone who looked like him on her last visit to the library. “Yeah, our local famous author. His house is in Stonykill.”

  “How do you like that,” Pierce said.

  “You’ve heard of him? He wasn’t really so famous.”

  “I think I’ve read most of his books. Once upon a time.”

  Rosie said, “Huh,” looking up at Pierce and experiencing a feeling very much like the feeling of conceiving a painting: the feeling of a number of things melding, turning out to be picturable as one thing. “Is there any chance,” she said, “you might need a job? I mean a part-time temporary kind of thing?”

  “I,” Pierce said.

  “And you were really a college teacher? Advanced degrees?”

  He gave her a brief vita.

  “Listen,” she said. “Wait here, will you, just a sec.”

  He indicated he had no place to hurry to. He watched her go slowly, in thought, across the lawn, and drift almost to a halt, deeper in thought; and then, mind made up, go quickly toward a group of players in white.

  He tried a few practice strokes, and then leaned on his mallet, alive in the middle of the day. Now those yellow flowers that had just been coming out when he arrived in the Faraways were gone; a bush of them there by the drive bore green leaves only, and a dusting of fallen petals at its base. The lilacs had come then, white and purple, and were themselves passing; and the rosebuds were heavy. And it was his, all his, the whole unfolding of it, he was not missing it all for the first time in years, for the first time since when? Since the tended quadrangles and cloisters of Noate at least.

  His county, and Fellowes Kraft’s too: and if that was some kind of omen, he must suppose it was a good one, though he was yet unused to seeing his life in such terms. The warmth of simple glee was all he felt so far, and astonishment all that he was sure of.

  A job. He saw Rosie come back toward him, quick, her face alight.

  “Boney thinks it’s a really great idea,” she said, taking Pierce’s arm, “and it will turn out really great for you, I know, so come meet him.”

  “Boney?”

  “Boney Rasmussen. Whose house this is.”

  “Your father.”

  “My uncle.”

  “Aha.” Rich uncles were perhaps common around here, as in an old novel. “And the job?”

  “Well listen,” she said. “If you’ll first just do me a favor. About Fellowes Kraft. There’ll be a job in it, I’m just sure.”

  “Aha.” He was being led toward a frail and bent and seemingly very aged man who rested on his mallet by the lemonade.

  “And boy it’s a relief to find you,” Rosie said.

  “Yes?” The old gent far off raised his hand in greeting, and Pierce raised his too, crossing the velvet lawn and, at the same time, feeling himself step across the threshold of an invisible portal: a portal through which there would be no going back again. He didn’t know why or wherefore, but he knew that it was so, for it was a sensation he had felt before.

  FOUR

  The first time Rosie had seen it, in March wind and rain, she had felt warned away; it was like a hermit’s or a wizard’s house, lonely on a wooded knoll at the end of a long dirt driveway, almost a causeway, which curled through bare and rocky fields. And it was one of those houses too that, to the right eye on the right evening, seemed to have a face: the hooded eyes of a pair of shuttered windows on either side of the nose and mouth of a door and its fanlight, chin of curved steps, mustaches of shaggy balsam. Rosie thought of the phrase from the poem, Death’s dream kingdom, to which this seemed the gatehouse or keeper’s cottage. And beyond it the dark pines gestured, impenetrable, and the hills rose up.

  When Pierce first saw it, though, the weather had changed, and it was only a small mock-Tudor cottage, stucco and brick and timber, somehow unconvincing; the eaves were deep, and rounded like thatch, but they were of tarpaper shingle. The rosy-red chimneys and many chimney pots, the mullioned windows and rose trellises, all said 1920 and not 1520. The pines were still dark behind it, though, and the eyes still blind.

  He was to go in it, with Rosie, and see what he could see; make a general assessment, sort of, she wasn’t quite sure, but she was sure she had neither the competence nor the desire to do it alone. That was the favor. Putting in order the stuff they found, cataloguing it maybe, deciding to sell or not sell the books and stuff if they were worth it—that was the job. If he wanted it.

  “While it’s still light,” Rosie said. “Just to check it out.”

  And so at evening (the croquet game having ended, Pierce coming in just barely last and much applauded) they climbed into the Bison with a couple of bottles of beer taken from the party offerings and tore away; Val called ironically after them, Rosie waved, the dogs in the back barked triumphantly.

  “I’ve put it off and put it off so long,” Rosie said, cradling the beer between her thighs. “You really didn’t have anything planned?”

  “Nothing,” said Pierce. The huge car rolled terrifically down the roadway, as often as not taking more than its allotted half. “Isn’t it usual,” he said, “to have a mirror to look out the back with?” He pointed to the gob of stickum on the window where there was no mirror.

  “You’ll get used to our ways,” Rosie said. She smiled sidewise at him. “So you think you’ll stay? Yeah? Settle down here, huh. Maybe get married.”

  “Ha ha,” he said. “You married?”

  “No,” she said, not quite truthfully. She had chosen to make no further reference to Spofford either. Not because she was hurt that he had in the end not come to play croquet, or called to explain. No. She just chose not to. No reason. No plan.

  “It was kinda sad, I guess,” she said, as they went through the town of Stonykill. “Boney says he got almost completely deaf toward the end there. And poor. He was a dapper little guy, and he sort of never quite went to pieces, but the show got a little thin. That’s how I picture it.”

  “Hm,” Pierce said, watching Stonykill pass: a mill town nearly depopulated, its mill in ruins—roofless walls pierced with ogee windows, which with the Gothic detail of chimney and clock tower suggested a ruined abbey, also unconvincing.

  “He used to walk into town and order his groceries,” Rosie said, pointing to a general store, “and buy a bottle, and the papers. With Scotty.”

  “Scotty?”

  “The dog.” She had turned off the main road, and sharply upward. “The saddest thing was when the dog died. That just about killed him. I think it was the saddest thing that ever happened to him. Oh, maybe when his mother, oh oops oops.”

  She had slammed on the power brakes, propelling Pierce into the dashboard. Craning her neck to look between the heads of the dogs who had come hurtling forward too, she backed up in a spray of gravel to a broad aluminum gate that, bolted into old stone gateposts, barred the drive. “Shot right pas
t it,” Rosie said, “but here we are.”

  She had been unable to find the key to the gate’s padlock, so they walked to the house along the dusty causeway. Crows making their way toward the pines cawed. The silver-gilt summer evening, daylight savings time, had seemingly ceased to pass away, and might last forever.

  “You want to see Scotty’s grave?” she asked. “It’s around back.”

  “I thought you hadn’t been here before.”

  “I came once. I looked in the windows. I just didn’t dare go in.”

  They passed around the still and observant house to the back, for it was the kitchen door Rosie had a key to, a round-arched dutch door. “Listen I’m just so grateful for this,” she said, struggling with the stiff lock.

  “No trouble,” he said. “It’s interesting. And I’m sure I could think of a favor to ask you. In return.”

  “Anytime,” she said, and the key turned.

  “Driving lessons.” Not his type, no. But at least not married; at least not the girlfriend of his only friend in the county.

  “Sure,” she said. “You can drive back.”

  She pushed open the door, and they went into the cold kitchen.

  “Okay,” Rosie said when she had closed the door behind them. She felt an urge to take Pierce’s hand for safety in the stillness. “Okay.”

  From being long shut up, the house had the musty smell of a reclusive animal’s den, and the small light through the leaded windows made it the more cavelike. A bachelor had lived here, a bachelor once upon a time fussy about his arrangements and his surroundings but who had come to neglect them, growing used over time to the desuetude and no longer actually seeing it. The furniture was good and well chosen but soiled and even a little squalid, a lamp repaired with tape, an upturned umbrella stand to hold an ashtray by the big armchair. The animal denned here had curled up in that chair, it still held his shape; that pale path in the rug that led from chair to Magnavox to liquor cabinet had been worn by his slippered feet. Pierce felt embarrassed by the intimacy of it.