R —— told us he played the piano and the flute, and he was forever moving his fingers on an imaginary keyboard or in the air beside his face, his lips blowing across a pretend mouthpiece. He talked of meeting a certain famous composer of our country before the war, and that subject interested Grandmother more than anything else he’d said. I left them chattering about conductors and concerts (they had some differences of opinion, it seemed), and I went out to stand guard and think about My answer is in three and seven, the words from inside the screaming mouth. The complete line was Round and round the dancers go and my answer is in three and seven.
These dancers, I reasoned, could be the same as the Pleiades in the poem: “Sisters dancing in the water and the sky”—not stars or sisters, but the fourteen inscriptions. They danced “round and round” the garden—the inscriptions were scattered all around the grove. I was sure I was on the right track.
Turning to the map I’d made, I counted the statues. If you left out the leaning house and considered the four women at the pool as one sculpture, there were ten in the lower garden: the dragon, Neptune, the sea serpent, Heracles, the boar, the pool, the elephant, the tortoise, the statue of which only feet remained, and the Angel of the Bottomless Pit. Ten: three plus seven. Did that mean the riddle’s answer was contained in the lower garden?
In the upper garden, I counted seven structures: the sleeping woman, the centaur, the Announcing Angel, the bear, the screaming mouth, the mermaid, and the temple. Seven . . . My answer is in three and seven. On the one hand, it could mean that the upper grove was false and insufficient, lacking “three”—whereas the lower grove, with seven and three—ten—was complete and held the answer. But on the other hand, it could mean that I needed the upper garden for the seven, and then three of something else. Could I isolate three of something in the lower half?
Seven urns on the terrace railing—that couldn’t be an accident, could it? My head was spinning. Seven women: four at the pool, one asleep, one a mermaid, and one vanished but for her sandaled feet.
It was overwhelming. For the moment, I’d have to stop thinking about numbers. I paced around the leaning house, listening, clearing my head. I passed the beautiful feet (Behold in me) and along the border of the central, impenetrable grove. As I neared Apollyon, the Angel of the Bottomless Pit, I looked away with a shiver—and stopped. Slowly, I turned back to face that terrible angel with the keys and the chain.
Why had I not seen it before? My fear of the statue, perhaps, had made me skip over a close investigation without intending to—but now that I looked, it was quite obvious: Apollyon’s base had an inscription, too.
So much for the neat number of fourteen I’d found. This made a fifteenth:
The path beyond the dusk
I copied it down and jotted the location with a hand that trembled. The angel glared at me from beneath his frozen, wind-streaming hair.
* * * *
Grandmother and I had to go home; we’d eaten no breakfast, and it was past lunchtime. But R —— refused to be shut again in the secret compartment.
“If someone comes,” Grandmother told him, “you’ll never be able to scramble back inside by yourself and close the lid—not without tearing loose all your stitches and making enough noise to raise the dead. And all this work will be for nothing.”
All this deception will be purely for art, I thought, my mind still numb from too much puzzling.
R —— shook his head.
“Stay hidden until Girandole gets back,” Grandmother said. “When he’s here to watch, you can stay out all you want.”
But R —— would have nothing of it. The cramped, black space with its tilted floor was driving him mad. “And want hear fairies,” he added. “Hear no good there.” He pointed at the sunken compartment. “Fairies sing in night.”
So, he was still hearing fairy music, either in dreams or when he was awake.
“I can’t imagine it’s good for you to be hearing them,” Grandmother told him. But she eventually saw that persuading him was a lost cause. “You’re not our prisoner, R ——. Stay out, then. But if the fairies steal you away, or the soldiers return, or someone from the village comes to see what all the fuss was about, or if wolves eat you, don’t come crying to me.”
R —— said he wouldn’t; and that, I supposed, was true enough.
Step by step, I helped Grandmother down from the upper room. On the way home, I asked her if there were really wolves in the forest.
“I’ve never seen one,” she said. But not liking the look of relief I gave her, she went on: “You know Mrs. O ——, with the thick eyeglasses? She claims in all her years of gardening, she’s never seen a single snake. I can’t believe snakes go out of their way to avoid her garden. The truth is, she’s just not seeing them.”
After a remark about how she’d missed nap time, she left me to my thoughts.
A little farther along, I asked her, “Do you know if there’s an inscription on Heracles’s base?”
“I’m fairly sure there’s not,” she said. “The bushes around him weren’t so thick when I was young, and I remember thinking that doing all those labors of his must have left him no time for words.”
We took a roundabout way getting home, crossing from the woods behind V ——’s ice house. Mrs. F ——, if she saw us arriving at our front door, would think we were coming back from town.
* * * *
After lunch, we both needed a long nap. The sky clouded over again as I was helping Grandmother in the garden before supper. Near dusk, another shower hissed into the leaves, making puddles along the fence row. “Well,” said Grandmother, gazing out from the back doorway, “every raindrop washes a little more of that stench away.”
“Do you think Mr. Girandole will come here first or go to the grove?” I asked, mostly because I wanted to say his name and wished he were back.
“The grove, I’d imagine.” Grandmother shut and locked the door. “That’s where he knows what to do.”
“He always knows what to do, doesn’t he?”
Grandmother shuffled into the kitchen, her stick clicking on the wooden floor. “Well, you saw him at a loss on the night R —— arrived.”
When we’d washed the supper dishes, Grandmother asked to see my notebook and settled in her chair by the lamp to study it. My mind was still worn out from all the thinking I’d done about the statues, counting and recounting . . .
Numbers. I still hadn’t copied down the numbers from the stairway in the leaning house. I would have to do that first thing.
“I’m going to hold down the fort tomorrow,” Grandmother announced, rubbing her eyes. “For one thing, I can’t run up and down mountains every day. For another, we can’t be gone all the time. The garden needs tending before the germander runs it over, and people come to the door sometimes. And for a third, I have to pay some visits to people myself if I don’t want to be rude. You go on up there if the sun comes out, and see if Girandole is back.”
We were just getting ready for bed when I suddenly thought of the mailbox outside the front door. While I was here, Grandmother had turned over to me the task of bringing in the daily handful of flyers, notices, and the occasional bill. I usually did this in the hour before supper. Today, I’d completely forgotten about it. I unlocked the heavy door, stepped out into the fragrant, drippy darkness under the porch roof, and opened the lid of the cast-iron box. Inside was a single letter in a small envelope.
In the patch of light angling from the back room where we sat at night, I recognized my father’s handwriting. The letter was addressed to both of us. I re-locked the door as fast as I could and raced back to Grandmother.
“Open it!” she said, handing me her letter-knife. She sat on the edge of her chair with her hands in her lap and told me to read it aloud.
Like all my papa’s letters, it had been opened once and taped
shut again. The Army did that to make sure the letter didn’t say anything that shouldn’t fall into enemy hands. My own hands trembled with excitement as I knelt in the warm light beside Grandmother’s chair and unfolded the cream-colored paper. It was dated months before, on the precise day I’d arrived in the village. We’d gotten four letters from Papa that he’d written later. I wondered what this one had gone through before it finally found its way here. It said:
Dear Mama and G ——,
I hope you are well and are enjoying the chance to get to know each other at last. I hope you will both forgive E —— and me for not making it happen sooner. It seems we go through our lives thinking that such-and-such will be easier when thus-and-so happens. But in all this moving and listening, fighting and mostly waiting, it’s come home to me that we shouldn’t put off anything good. Anyway, I don’t have to ask how you’re getting along. I know you both quite well, and I’d guess it will be a real struggle for E —— and me to separate you two at the end of the summer.
G ——, the village is a wonderful place, isn’t it? What did I tell you? I love the way time passes there, and what the people talk about, and the way the arbors whisper, and how the sun makes the tomatoes ripen, and how the woods glow with their green light. I’d bet it has changed hardly at all since I was a boy. I find that very comforting!
Here, it’s more of the same. I know you want some news, but we’re not supposed to say anything about operations, and there’s really not much to tell—nothing real, in the way that the village is real and families are real—what we’re doing in the war is the bad business of another world. I’ll be glad when I can come home to the real one. But I’m well, and I think of you every day and every night. Sometimes the light falls just right here, too—like now, in fact, as I’m sitting in the corner of a little garden behind a farm house, and the sun is shining down through the leaves of a brave old oak tree; and the tree is telling me that it knows the bad business will be done someday, maybe before very long. When I’m under a tree like this, I feel—no, I know—that we are just in different corners of the same sacred woods.
Well, speaking of woods, do you go up there, G ——, to the forest above Mama’s cottage? If she hasn’t shown you the Grove of Monsters yet, that’s what you have to do. Don’t you dare leave there without seeing it.
And speaking of the monsters in the grove: there’s a surprise I’ve been saving for you, G ——, an interesting mystery of sorts. The monsters’ garden seems to be a big puzzle, which I was always trying to solve when I was a boy. It’s full of words and images that make you think. There’s something I remembered a few years ago that I’d completely forgotten for a long time. I’d hoped we might visit Mama together and have another crack at the riddle, and we may still be able to do that, but I wanted to give you a head start, since you’re there now.
When I was about your age, I found something in the grove that I kept secret—I didn’t even tell you, Mama, because I felt in a way that I was stealing, and I was afraid you might tell me not to fool around with property that wasn’t mine. You see, I rather thought that the garden and all the monsters were mine, because no one else seemed to want anything to do with them. They were all alone in the woods, covered with vines and overgrown by bushes.
Reading those lines, I felt sorry again for my papa: he’d had neither Grandmother nor Mr. Girandole with him in the garden, not ever. How different—how lonely—it would be to have no one to share it with.
In the grove, there’s one statue that’s scarier than all the others—a terrible angel with a ring of keys and a chain. The keys are held against the angel’s side, touching his robes. Why I tried this I’ll never know, but I discovered that when I fiddled with those keys, one of them slid sideways. The statue’s stone key was a kind of lid, and underneath it, in the robes, was a key-shaped depression. And in that depression was a REAL KEY made of brass.
I looked high and low in the garden for years after that, all over the walls, the arches, the statues and their bases, but I never did find a keyhole that the key might fit. Nor do I have any idea what a locked door in such a place might conceal, but I was always intrigued by what the words on that frightening angel’s base said: The path beyond the dusk.
As your father, I’m not sure if I should be telling you this or not. But I know Mama is with you, and she won’t let you do anything too dangerous.
At this point, Grandmother laughed aloud, and pretty soon I joined her, until we were both wiping our eyes with our sleeves. When I got control of myself, I continued:
In fact, the key is still there at the cottage. In the sitting room, you know the funny little corner beside the built-in bookcase? Level with the bookcase’s top, there’s a strip of trim cut to fit that odd, short wall in the corner. If you slide that strip upward, you’ll find a space behind it, inside the wall. (I guess I was always pushing and pulling on things to see if they opened.) In there, you should find the key hanging on a nail.
I figured this was a good time to tell you both about it. Think of it as my summer present to you. If you’re of a mind to try solving a puzzle, perhaps you’ll do better than I did. Just be careful. And please don’t go anywhere that you can’t come back from!
Well, duty is calling me to stop writing now. I’ll write again as soon as I get the chance.
I love you both very much. Mama, I’m wearing the socks you sent me. They’re holding up well, and a good thing—we’re on our feet a lot. Thank you!
I remain your adoring son and father,
A ——
Intrigued as we both were by the last part of the letter, neither of us sprang up at once to run to the bookcase. We wanted to read and re-read the letter’s first half, with its talk of trees and sunlight and how we were all together in the same wood, and how he thought of us day and night.
“He writes good letters,” I said at last.
“He always has,” Grandmother answered.
Grandmother had me hold the lamp, and she handled the exploration; it was her house, after all. Sure enough, the narrow board in the bookcase corner popped out of place with a bit of tugging. It slid upward as if in a track and then came loose. Behind it was a cobwebby gap between joists, a vertical shaft formed by the rear wall of laths, the upright braces, and the paneling of the sitting room. And straight before our eyes was an ancient-looking key, suspended on a nail by its ornate head. Grandmother let me get a close look before she touched it. Then she reached in and carefully lifted it off. We both knew that if she dropped it, it would fall behind the wall.
I breathed again when the key was safely out in the room. Grandmother carried it over to the table, and I brought the lamp close. “By all the saints in glory,” she murmured. “I never dreamed this was hanging back there all these years. That little rascal! What if we’d remodeled the room, as your grandfather talked of doing?”
At her instructions, I fetched the damp cleaning-rag from the kitchen, and Grandmother found her kit for polishing the silverware. She soon had the key shining like new. It was half again as long as my hand with my fingers extended. There were no markings or writing on the key—just a broad, ornamental head, a strong, heavy shank, and elaborate flanges for a lock. I laid it on a page of my notebook and drew lines to indicate its dimensions, making special note of how big a matching keyhole would need to be. (I saw at once it was far too big to fit into any of the holes in the leaning house—I was glad we wouldn’t have to try those one by one.) I’d decided to leave the key here at the cottage until I found a use for it. On the page, I wrote “Papa’s Summer Present.” I didn’t write anything about a key, just in case my notebook was ever confiscated.
“I’ll write a letter to him tomorrow,” Grandmother said sleepily. “You can add a page or two before we mail it. For now, you’d better try to sleep and leave before sunrise again. I’ll wake you up.”
So, that’s what we did. I put the key
into the drawer of my night table, among the seashells from Wool Island, looked for a long time at our photo, at my parents’ happy faces, and lay in the dark, listening to the insects and the trees rustling. I felt deliciously tired. My father had given me two other presents, I thought, both better than the key itself: one was sending me here to Grandmother’s house for the summer, and the other was the message that we were together in investigating the garden’s mystery. At last, Papa had us to share the garden with. I felt as close to him now as I ever had, though I was here and he was somewhere in a tent or a barracks far away.
* * * *
As she’d promised, Grandmother gently shook me awake in the dark hour before dawn. I covered my eyes at first, not wanting to leave the pleasant dream I’d been having, though already I’d forgotten what it had been about. I thought that if I stayed in bed, I might slide back down into the dream. But I remembered R —— and Mr. Girandole and my eagerness to return to the grove before I ran out of days.
I stepped onto the cool, clean floorboards, checked on the key—to make sure that it hadn’t been part of my dream—and stumbled off to the bathroom.
“I don’t expect you feel like breakfast yet,” Grandmother said. (The fact that she still wore her nightgown told me she planned to go back to bed when she’d sent me off.) “But there’s plenty in this bag for you to eat, too.” She’d loaded a bag with rolls, cheese, crackers, plums, tangerines, and a bottle each of milk and water. “Drink the milk early,” she advised. “It’ll be hot today.”
Going out the back door to check the weather, I could see the last pale stars in a sky of deep blue. A soft wind riffled the hedge. The scent of the tomato vines tickled the back of my throat.
A Green and Ancient Light Page 18
