by John Crowley
The intercom buzzed. Eigenblick went to it, looked thoughtfully at the array of bottons on it, finger to his lips, and then punched one. Nothing happened. He pushed another, and a voice made of static spoke: “Everything is ready, sir.”
“Ja,” Eigenblick said. “Moment.” He released the button, realized he hadn’t been heard, pressed another, and repeated himself. He turned to Hawksquill. “However it is you’ve found out these things,” he said, “you have obviously not found out all. You see,” he went on, a broad smile on his face and his eyes cast upward with the look of one confident of his election, “I’m in the cards. Nothing that can happen to me can deflect a destiny set elsewhere long ago. Protected. All this was meant to be.”
“Your Majesty,” Hawksquill said, “perhaps I haven’t made myself clear….”
“Will you stop calling me that!” he said, furious.
“Sorry. Perhaps I haven’t made myself clear. I know very well that you are in the cards—a deck of very pretty ones, with trumps at least obstensibly designed to foretell and encourage the return of your old Empire; designed and drawn, I would guess, some time in the reign of Rudolf II, and printed in Prague. They have been put to other uses since. Without your being, so to speak, any the less in them.”
“Where are they?” he said, suddenly coming toward her, avaricious hands like claws held out. “Give them to me. I must have them.”
“If I may go on,” Hawksquill said.
“They’re my property,” Eigenblick said.
“Your Empire’s,” she said. “Once.” She stared him into silence, and said: “If I may go on: I know you’re in the cards. I know what powers put you there, and—a little—to what end. I know your destiny. What you must believe, if you are to accomplish it, is that I am in it.”
“You.”
“Come to warn you, and to aid you. I have powers. Great enough to have discovered all this, to have found you out, needle in the haystack of Time. You have need of me. Now. And in time to come.”
He considered her. She saw doubt, hope, relief, fear, resolution come and go in his big face. “Why,” he said, “was I never told about you?”
“Perhaps,” she said, “because they didn’t know about me.” “Nothing is hidden from them.”
“Much is. You would do well to learn that.”
He chewed his cheek for a moment, but the battle was over. “What’s in it for you?” he said. The intercom buzzed again.
“We’ll discuss my reward later,” she said. “Just now, before you answer that, you’d better decide what you will tell your visitors.”
“Will you be with me?” he said, suddenly needful.
“They mustn’t see me,” Hawksquill said. “But I’ll be with you.” A cheap trick, a cat’s bone; and yet (she thought, as Eigenblick punched at the intercom) just the thing to convince the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, if he remembered his youth at all, that indeed she did have the powers she claimed. With his back to her, she disappeared; when he turned to face her, or the place where she had been, she said, “Shall we go meet the Club?”
Crossroads
The day was gray, a certain pale and moist gray, when Auberon descended from the bus at the crossroads. He had had words with the driver about being let off at this particular place; had had difficulty at first in describing it, then in convincing the driver that he actually passed such a spot. The driver shook his head slowly in negative as Auberon described, his eyes not meeting Auberon’s, and said “Nope, nope,” softly, as though lost in thought; a transparent lie, Auberon knew, the man simply didn’t want to make the slightest variation in his routine. Coldly polite, Auberon described the place again, then sat in the first place behind the driver, his eyes peeled; and tapped the driver when the place approached. Got out, triumphant, a sentence forming on his tongue about the hundreds of times the man must have passed this place, if that was the level of observation to be found in the men the public was urged to leave the driving to, etc.; but the door hissed shut and the long gray bus ground its gears like teeth and lurched away.
The fingerboard he stood by pointed as always down the road toward Edgewood; more haggard, leaning at a more senescent angle, the name more time-erased than he remembered or than it had been when he had last seen it, but the same. He started down the looping road, brown as milk-chocolate after the rain, stepping along cautiously and surprised by the loudness of his footfalls. He hadn’t understood how much he had been deprived of during his months in the City. The Art of Memory could make a plan of his past where all this had perhaps a place, but it couldn’t have restored to him this fullness: these odors, sweet and moist and vivifying, as though the air had a clear liquid texture; the constant low nameless sound filling up the air, whispering loud to his dull ear, pricked out with birdsong; the very sense of volume, of far distances and middle distances made up out of lines and groups of new-leaving trees and the roll and heap of the earth. He was able to survive outside all this well enough—air was air, after all, here or in the City—but, once plunged down within it again, he might have felt returned to a native element, might have uncurled within it, soul expanding like a butterfly sprung from its confining coccoon. In fact he did stretch his arms out, breathe deeply, and quote a few lines of verse. But his soul was a cold stone.
As he went along, he felt himself to be accompanied by someone: someone young, someone not in a lank brown overcoat, someone not hung over, someone who tugged at his sleeve, reminding him that here he’d used to pull his bike over the wall to return by secret ways to the Summer House and the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, there he’d fallen out of a tree, there bent down with Doc to hear the mutter of closeted woodchucks. It had all happened once, to someone, to this insistent someone. Not to him … The gray stone pillars topped with gray oranges rose up where and when they always would. He reached up to one to touch the pitted surface, clammy and slick with spring. Down at the end of the drive his sisters awaited him on the porch.
Now for God’s sake. His homecoming was to be no more secret than his leaving—and as he thought this, he realized for the first time that he had intended it to be secret, had supposed himself able to slip back into the house without anyone’s noticing he had been gone for some eighteen months. Foolish! And yet the last thing he wanted was a fuss made over him. Too late, anyway, for as he stood by the gate-posts uncertainly, Lucy had spied him and leapt up waving. She pulled Lily after her to run and greet him; Tacey more regally kept to the peacock chair, dressed in a long skirt and one of his old tweed jackets.
“Hi, hi,” he said, casual but suddenly aware of the figure he must cut, unshaven and bloodshot, with his shopping bag and the City dirt beneath his nails and in his hair. So clean and vernal Lucy and Lily seemed, so glad, that he was torn between drawing back from them and kneeling before them to beg their forgiveness; and though they embraced him and took his bag from him, talking both at once, he knew they read him.
“You’ll never guess who came here,” Lucy said.
“An old woman,” Auberon said, glad that once in his life he could be sure he guessed right, “with a gray bun. How’s Mom? How’s Dad?”
“But who she is you’ll never guess,” Lily said.
“Did she tell you I was coming? I never said it to her.”
“No. But we knew. But guess.”
“She is,” Lucy said, “a cousin. In a way. Sophie found out. It was years ago …”
“In England,” Lily said. “Do you know the Auberon you’re named after? Well, he was Violet Bramble Drinkwater’s son …”
“But not John Drinkwater’s! A love child …”
“How do you keep all these people straight?” Auberon asked.
“Anyway. Back in England Violet Bramble had an affair. Before she married John. With someone named Oliver Hawksquill.” “A swain,” Lily said.
“And got pregnant, and that was Auberon. And this lady …”
“Hello, Auberon,” Tacey said. “How was the City?” “Gee, just great,” Auberon
said, feeling a hard lump rise in his throat and water spring to his eyes. “Great.” “Did you walk?” Tacey asked.
“No, the bus, actually.” They were silent a moment at that. No help for it. “So listen. How’s Mom? How’s Dad?” “Fine. She got your card.”
A horror swept him as he thought of the few cards and letters he had sent from the City, evasive and bragging, or uncommunicative, or horribly facetious. The last one, Mom’s birthday, he had found, oh God, unsigned in a trash can he was examining, a bouquet of smarmy sentiments; but his silence had been long and he was drunk and he sent it. He saw now that it must have been to her like being stabbed cruelly with a butter knife. He sat down on the steps of the porch, unable just for the moment to go further.
An Awful Mess
“Well, what do you think, Ma?” Daily Alice asked as she stood looking into the dank darkness of the old icebox.
Momdy was examining the stock inside the cupboards. “Tuna wiggle?” she said doubtfully. “Oh dear,” Alice said. “Smoky will give me a look. You know that look?”
“Oh, I do.”
“Well.” Beneath her gaze the few damp items on the slatted metal shelves seemed to shrink away. There was a constant drip, as in a cave. Daily Alice thought of the old days, the great white refrigerator chock-full of crisp vegetables and colorful containers, perhaps a varnished turkey or a diamondback ham, and neatly wrapped meats and meals asleep in the icy-breathing freezer. And a cheerful light that winked on to show it all, as on a stage. Nostalgia. She put her hand on a luke-cold milk bottle and said, “Did Rudy come today?”
“No.”
“He’s really getting too old for that,” Alice said. “Lifting big blocks of ice. And he forgets.” She sighed, still looking within; Rudy’s decline, and the general falling-off in the amenities of life, and the not-so-hot dinner probably awaiting them all, all seemed contained within the zinc-lined icebox.
“Well, don’t hold the door open, dear,” Momdy said softly. Alice was closing it when the swinging doors of the pantry opened.
“Oh my God,” Alice said. “Oh, Auberon.”
She came quickly to embrace him, hurrying to him as though he were in deep trouble and she must instantly rescue him. His harrowed look, though, came less from the trouble he was in than from the trip he had just taken through the house, which had assaulted him unmercifully with memories, odors he’d forgotten he knew, scarred furniture and worn rugs and garden-exhibiting windows that filled his eyesight to the brim, as if it had been half a lifetime and not a year and a half he’d been away.
“Hi,” he said.
She released him. “Look at you,” she said. “What is it?”
“What’s what?” he said, attempting a smile, wondering what degradation she read in his features. Daily Alice raised a wondering finger and traced the line of his single eyebrow across his nose. “When did you grow that?”
“Huh?”
Daily Alice touched the place above her own nose where (though faintly, because of her lighter hair) she bore the mark of Violet’s descendants.
“Oh.” He shrugged. He hadn’t actually noticed; he hadn’t been studying mirrors much lately. “I dunno.” He laughed. “How do you like that?” He stroked it himself. Soft and fine as baby hair, with one or two coarser hairs springing from it. “I must be getting old,” he said.
She saw that that was so; that he had crossed in his absence some threshold beyond which life is consumed faster than it increases; she could see the marks of it in his face and the backs of his hands. A hard lump formed in her throat, and she embraced him again so that she wouldn’t have to speak. Over her shoulder, to his grandmother, Auberon said, “Hi Momdy, listen, listen, don’t get up, don’t.”
“Well, you’re a bad boy, not to have written your mother,” Momdy said. “To tell us you were coming. Not a thing for supper.”
“Oh, that’s okay, that’s okay,” he said, releasing himself from his mother and coming to kiss Momdy’s feathery soft cheek. “How have you been?”
“The same, the same.” She looked up at him from where she sat, studying him shrewdly. He’d always had the sense his grandmother knew some discreditable secret about him, and if she could just squeeze it between the thick layers of her usual discourse, it would be revealed. “I go on,” she said. “You’ve grown.”
“Gee, I don’t think so.”
“Either that or I’d forgotten how big you’d got.”
“Yeah, that’s it…. Well.” The two women looked him over from the heights of two generations, seeing different views. He felt examined. He knew he ought to take off his overcoat, but he had forgotten exactly what was underneath it; he sat instead at the far end of the table and said again, “Well.”
“Tea,” Alice said. “How about some tea? And you can tell us all your adventures.”
“Tea would be great,” he said.
“And how’s George?” Momdy asked. “And his people?”
“Oh, fine.” He hadn’t been to Old Law Farm in months. “Fine, same as ever.” He shook his head in amusement at funny George. “That crazy farm.”
“I remember,” she said, “when that was really such a nice place. Years ago. The corner house, that was the one the Mouse family first lived in …”
“Still do, still do,” Auberon said. He glanced at his mother, who was busy with teapot and water at the big stove; surreptitiously she brushed her eyes with the sleeve of her sweatshirt, and then saw that he caught her at it, and turned to face him, teapot in her hands.
“… and after Phyllis Townes died,” Momdy was going on, “well that was a protracted illness, her doctor thought he’d chased it down to her kidneys, but she thought …”
“So how was it, really?” Alice said to her son. “Really.”
“Really it wasn’t so hot,” Auberon said. He looked down. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, oh well,” she said.
“For not writing and all. There wasn’t much to say.”
“That’s okay. We were afraid for you, that’s all.”
He lifted his eyes. He really hadn’t thought of that. Here he’d been swallowed down by the teeming terrible City, swallowed as by a dragon’s mouth and hardly been heard of again; of course they’d been afraid for him. As it had once before in this kitchen, a window rose within him and he saw, through it, his own reality. People loved him, and worried about him; his personal worth didn’t even enter into it. He lowered his eyes again, ashamed. Alice turned back to the stove. His grandmother filled the silence with reminiscence, the details of dead relatives’ sickness, remission, relapse, decline and death. “Mm, mm-hm,” he said, nodding, studying the scarred surface of the table. He had sat, without choosing to, at his old place, at his father’s right hand, Tacey’s left.
“Tea,” Alice said. She put the teapot on a trivet, and patted its fat belly. She put a cup before him. And waited, then, hands folded, for him to pour it, or for something; he glanced up at her and was about to try to speak, to answer the question he saw posed in her, if he could, if he could think of words, when the double doors of the pantry flew open and Lily and the twins came in, and Tony Buck.
“Hi Uncle Auberon,” the twins (Bud the boy and Blossom the girl) shouted in unison, as though Auberon hadn’t quite arrived yet and they had to call far to be heard. Auberon stared at them: they seemed to be twice the size they had been, and they could talk: they hadn’t been able to when he left, had they? Hadn’t he last seen them still carried fore and aft by their mother in a canvas carrier? Lily, at their insistence, began to go through cupboards, looking for good things to eat, the twins were unimpressed by the solitary teapot but certainly it was time for something. Tony Buck shook Auberon’s hand and said, “Hey, how was the City?”
“Oh, hey, swell,” Auberon said in a tone like Tony’s, hearty and no-nonsense; Tony turned to Alice and said, “So Tacey said maybe we should have a couple rabbits tonight.”
“Oh, Tony, that would be terrific,” Alice said.
Tacey herself came through the door then, calling Tony’s name. “Is that okay, Ma?” she said.
“It’s great,” Alice said. “Better than tuna wiggle.”
“Kill the fatted calf,” Momdy said, the only one there to whom the phrase would have occurred. “And fricassee it.”
“Smoky’ll be so happy,” said Alice to Auberon. “He loves rabbit, but he can’t ever feel it’s his place to suggest it.”
“Listen,” Auberon said, “don’t make any fuss just for …” He couldn’t, in his self-effacement, bring himself to say personal pronouns. “I mean just because …”
“Uncle Auberon,” said Bud, “did you see any muggerds?”
“Hm?”
“Muggerds.” He curved his fingers predatorily at Auberon. “Who get you. In the City.”
“Well, as a matter of fact …” But Bud had noticed (he hadn’t ever quite taken his eyes from her) that his sister Blossom had acquired a cookie of a sort that hadn’t been offered to him, and he had to hurry to put in a claim.
“Now out, out!” said Lily.
“You wanna go see the rabbits die?” her daughter asked her, taking her hand.
“No, I don’t,” said Lily, but Blossom, wanting her mother with her for the dread and fascinating event, pulled her by the hand.
“It only takes a second,” she said reassuringly, drawing her mother after her. “Don’t be afraid.” They went out through the summer kitchen and the door that led to the kitchen-garden, Lily, Bud and Blossom, and Tony. Tacey had filled a cup for herself and one for Momdy, and with them backed out the pantry doors; Momdy followed her.
Grump grump grump said the doors behind them.
Alice and Auberon sat alone in the kitchen, the storm of them having passed as quickly as it came on.
“So,” Auberon said. “It seems like everybody’s fine here.”
“Yes. Fine.”
“Do you mind,” he said, rising slowly like an old man, much tried, “if I get myself a drink?”
“No, sure,” Alice said. “There’s some sherry there, and other things, I think.”
